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.”
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)