Comment by eurekin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eurekin | Hacker News Reader

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So, players wanting:

- To their PC not reboot and BSOD (was a case few months ago)

- Be able to actually finish a mission (game still crashes a lot just after extraction, it's still rare for the full team to survive 3 missions in a row)

- Be able to use weapon customisation (the game crashed, when you navigated to the page with custom paints)

- Continue to run, even when anybody else from the team was stimming (yes, any person in the team stimming caused others to slow down)

- Actually be able to hear one of the biggest enemies in the game

- To not issue stim/reload/weapon change multiple times, for them just to work (it's still normal to press stim 6 times in some cases, before it activates, without any real reason)

- Be able to use chat, when in the vehicle (this would result in using your primary weapon)

- Be able to finish drill type mission (this bugs out a lot still)

- Not be attacked by enemies that faze through buildings

- Not be attacked by bullets passing through terrain, despite the player bullets being stopped there

are just vocal player's complaints? A lot of those bugs went totally unaddressed for months. Some keep coming back in regressions. Some just are still ongoing. This is only a short list of things I came across, while casually playing. It's a rare sight to have a full OP without an issue (even mission hardlocks still).

About Sony - I specifically referred the Shams Jorjani's (CEO of ArrowHead) explanation to Hermen Hulst (the head of PlayStation Studios) why the review score collapsed to 19%, among other issues.

As someone with 700 hours in the game, I've played the game both on Windows and Linux.

A lot of issues are to do with the fact that the game seems to corrupt itself. If I have issues (usually performance related), I do a steam integrity check and I have zero issues afterwards. BTW, I've had to do this on several games now, so this isn't something that is unique to HellDivers. My hardware is good BTW, I check in various utils and the drives are "ok" as far as I can tell.

> - To their PC not reboot and BSOD (was a case few months ago)

This was hyped up by a few big YouTubers. The BSODs was because their PCs were broken. One literally had a burn mark on their processor (a known issue with some boards/processor combos) and the BSODs went away when they replaced their processor. This tells me that there was something wrong with their PC and any game would have caused a BSOD.

So I am extremely sceptical of any claims of BSODs because of a game. What almost is always the case is that the OS or the hardware is at issue and playing a game will trigger the issue.

If you are experiencing BSODs I would make sure your hardware and OS are actually good, because they are probably not. BTW I haven't a BSOD in Windows for about a decade because I don't buy crap hardware.

> - Be able to actually finish a mission (game still crashes a lot just after extraction, it's still rare for the full team to survive 3 missions in a row)

False. A few months ago I played it for an entire day and the game was fine. Last week I played it a good portion of Saturday night. I'm in several large HellDivers focused Discord servers and I've not heard a lot of people complaining about it. Maybe 6 months ago or a year ago this was the case, but not now.

> Be able to use weapon customisation (the game crashed, when you navigated to the page with custom paints)

This happened for like about a week for some people and I personally didn't experience this.

> To not issue stim/reload/weapon change multiple times, for them just to work (it's still normal to press stim 6 times in some cases, before it activates, without any real reason)

I've not experience this. Not heard anyone complain about this and I am in like 4 different HellDivers focus'd discord servers

> Not be attacked by enemies that faze through buildings

This can be annoying, but it happens like once in a while. It isn't the end of the world.

> So I am extremely sceptical of any claims of BSODs because of a game.

Generally speaking, I am too. That is unless there is kernel-level anticheat. In that case I believe it's fair to disregard all other epistemological processes and blame BSODs on the game out of principle

I had them and I keep observing this strange tendency to wipe that particular issue out of existence

> In that case I believe it's fair to disregard all other epistemological processes and blame BSODs on the game out of principle

I am sorry but that is asinine and unscientific. You should blame BSODs on what is causing them. I don't like kernel anti-cheat but I will blame the actual cause of the issues, not assign blame on things which I don't approve of.

I am a long time Linux user and many of the people complaining about BSODs on Windows had a broken the OS in one way or another. Some were running weird stuff like 3rd party shell extensions that modify core DLLs, or they had installed every POS shovelware/shareware crap. That isn't Microsoft's fault if you start running an unsupported configuration of the OS.

Similarly. The YouTubers that were most vocal about HellDivers problems did basically no proper investigation other than saying "look it crashed", when it was quite clearly their broken hardware that was the issue. As previously stated their CPU had a burn mark on one of the pins, some AM5 had faults that caused this IIRC. So everything indicated hardware failure being the cause of the BSOD. They still blamed the game, probably because it got them more watch time.

During the same time period when people were complaining about BSODs, I didn't experience one. I was running the same build of the game as them and playing on the same difficulty and sometimes recording it via OBS (just like they were). What I didn't have was a AM5 motherboard, I have and older AM4 motherboard which doesn't have these problems.

> that is asinine and unscientific

Well, yes. I did say something to that effect. Blaming BSODs on invasive anti-cheat out of principle is a political position, not a scientific one.

> During the same time period when people were complaining about BSODs, I didn't experience one. I was running the same build of the game as them and playing on the same difficulty and sometimes recording it via OBS (just like they were). What I didn't have was a AM5 motherboard, I have and older AM4 motherboard which doesn't have these problems.

I understand what you're saying here, but anyone who does a substantial amount of systems programming could tell you that hardware-dependent behavior is evidence for a hardware problem, but does not necessarily rule out a software bug that only manifests on certain hardware. For example, newer hardware could expose a data race because one path is much faster. Alternatively, a subroutine implemented with new instructions could be incorrect.

Regardless, I don't doubt that this issue with Helldivers 2 was caused by (or at least surfaced by) certain hardware, but that does not change that given such an issue, I would presume the culprit is kernel anticheat until presented strong evidence to the contrary.

> Well, yes. I did say something to that effect. Blaming BSODs on invasive anti-cheat out of principle is a political position, not a scientific one.

When there are actual valid concerns about the anti-cheat, these will be ignored because of people that assigned blame to it when unwarranted. This is why making statements based on your ideology can be problematic.

> I understand what you're saying here, but anyone who does a substantial amount of systems programming could tell you that hardware-dependent behavior is evidence for a hardware problem, but does not necessarily rule out a software bug that only manifests on certain hardware. For example, newer hardware could expose a data race because one path is much faster. Alternatively, a subroutine implemented with new instructions could be incorrect.

People were claiming it was causing hardware damage which is extremely unlikely since both Intel, AMD and most hardware manufacturers have mechanisms which prevent this. This isn't some sort of opaque race condition.

> RI would presume the culprit is kernel anti-cheat until presented strong evidence to the contrary.

You should know that if you making assumptions without evidence that will often lead you astray.

I don't like kernel anti-cheat and would prefer for it not to exist, but making stupid statements based on ideology instead of evidence just makes you look silly.

> - To their PC not reboot and BSOD (was a case few months ago)

I was just about to replace my gpu (4090 at that!), I had them 3 times a session. I did sink a lot of hours to debug that (replaced cables, switched PSUs between desktops) and just gave up. After few weeks, lo and behold, a patch comes out and it all disappears.

A lot of people just repeat hearsay about the game

> > - Be able to actually finish a mission (game still crashes a lot just after extraction, it's still rare for the full team to survive 3 missions in a row)

> False. A few months ago I played it for an entire day and the game was fine. Last week I played it a good portion of Saturday night. I'm in several large HellDivers focused Discord servers and I've not heard a lot of people complaining about it. Maybe 6 months ago or a year ago this was the case, but not now.

I specifically mean the exact time, right after the pelican starts to fly. I keep seeing "<player> left" or "disconnected". Some come back and I have a habit of asking: "Crash?", they respond with "yeah"

If that is happening, they need to do a Steam Integrity check. I understand the game is buggy, but it isn't that buggy.

It's basically an Internet fable at this point that there's "a game that physically damages your hardware".

The answer to every such claim is just: no. But it's click bait gold to the brain damage outrage YouTuber brigade.

Accidentally using a ton of resources might e reveal weaknesses, but it is absolutely not any software vendors problem that 100% load might reveal your thermal paste application sucked or Nvidia is skimping on cable load balancing.

This was pretty much my take as well. I have an older CPU, Motherboard and GPU combo before the newer GPU power cables that obviously weren't tested properly and I have no problems with stability.

These guys are running an intensive game on the highest difficulty, while streaming and they probably have a bunch of browser windows and other software running background. Any weakness in the system is going to be revealed.

I had performance issues during that time and I had to restart game every 5 matches. But it takes like a minute to restart the game.

Trust me, I'm a software developer with more than two decades of experience. Have been dabbling in hardware since the Amiga 500 era. "I have that specific set of skills" that allows me to narrow down a class of issues pretty well - just a lot of component switching in a binary divide and conquer fashion across hardware.

The issue is 1) actually exaggarated in the community, but not without actual substance 2) getting disregarded exactly because of exaggarations. It was a very real thing.

I also happen to have a multi gpu workstation that works flawlessly too

>I specifically referred the Shams Jorjani's (CEO of ArrowHead) explanation to Hermen Hulst (the head of PlayStation Studios) why the review score collapsed to 19%, among other issues.

I don't know what you mean. The game literally got 84,000 negative reviews within 24 hours after Sony tried to force PSN on everyone. No bug or missing feature ever came anywhere close to this kind of negative sentiment toward the game.

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