PAYDAY 2 V8 - Mint-Condition Thread - Games

[QUOTE=Mister Sandman;48976656]The core game hasn't changed, but the rest of the game has been shoved full of so much DLC, advertisements, and microtransactions that honestly I have no passion at all for playing the game when I used to love it Payday 2, as a whole, is just shit now, good gameplay doesn't redeem everything else being the fucking worst[/QUOTE] Basically how I feel, Payday 2 is a fantastic game that's been dreadfully soured by questionable business tactics and it makes it harder for me to want to play the game. It's a damn shame really. [editline]25th October 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=TechnoSandwic;48976670]You know, as much as I wish it wasn't, a developers (or in this case, likely the publisher- Starbreeze) end goal will, in most cases, always be able earning money. DLC is the way they earn money, and it's likely just Overkill working with a quota set in place by Starbreeze. Besides, the DLC has always been optional, just like the microtransactions. It's shitty but it's in no way forced for you to play the game. Plus, after the weapon rebalance you don't even need DLC to kick ass and hit that 42 damage, [B]because basically every gun is decent now[/B].[/QUOTE] I could disagree with parts of what you said but you've heard all of that already. However, I do think it's pretty much a unanimous opinion that the weapon re-balance really fucked a lot of the guns.

[QUOTE=Tsyolin;48976675]I could disagree with parts of what you said but you've heard all of that already. However, I do think it's pretty much a unanimous opinion that the weapon re-balance really fucked a lot of the guns.[/QUOTE] The rebalancing has messed with a lot of guns- it's changed what guns you use and how. I'm happy because of that, because the CAR-4 meta was getting really boring.

[QUOTE=Menien Goneld;48976622]What's the problem with that? The reviews were accurate when they were posted, the experience they had was sufficiently positive for them to recommend the game to others, and that says something. The current most helpful reviews are all negative, and together explain to any new customers what they should take into account when considering a purchase. It's a more truthful representation of the game that the initial reviews are positive, with current reviews being negative. You have a heavy bias against the game, and that's fine, there are good reasons for that (which for the most part you have elaborated upon well). But if we're talking about informing people about whether the game is good or not, it's much better to be honest, and in my honest opinion, the game is very good. It's provided most people in this thread (myself included) with hundreds of hours of enjoyment with their friends. Leaving negative reviews is one of the few ways the community has to 'strike back' against anti-consumer/anti-player policies, and I'm grateful for the effect it has, but it's not exactly truthful. The system is not there for you to object to company practice, and those with hundreds or even thousands of hours use of a product suddenly claiming that it isn't worth the price of purchase due to recent changes, or a developer going back on a promise is not only false and unhelpful to new customers, but also malicious. You're not writing for any potential player's benefit, you're writing to hurt the company. Posting negative reviews because you're mad is dumb, wanting honest positive reviews to change is worse.[/QUOTE] I don't see how leaving a negative review because of developer decisions is invalid. Does the core gameplay remain the same? Yes. But when the game changes in a major way, like it has, in a way that most people find morally objectionable, I think it's entirely fair to go out and slap a buyer beware on there. Is the priority to hurt the developer and the game's sales? Yes, and I'm fine with that, because nothing makes a company listen like actual, tangible consequences, but it also benefits people who aren't aware of what's going on, and how the game has changed for the worse. Someone who's never played the game and is browsing the store page is not going to know how ad filled the game is, how useless much of the DLC is, or the controversial events like Hype Train and Crimefest, that might have otherwise changed their opinion. Nowhere on the Payday 2 store page does it talk about microtransactions. Nowhere does it talk about missing content, unfulfilled promises, developer lies, or anything of the sort. [quote]Payday 2 is a game that I've sunk hundreds of hours in but can at best only cautiously recommend. If you're buying this be aware of several flaws with the game that you need to be aware of before you make your purchase. Any of these things can be fixed but as of the date of this review, October 2015, this is the state of Payday 2. Note that this is a good game at it's core that I love deeply but these things are ruining it at the moment. DLC: DLC is a massive thing in Payday 2. There are well over a hundred dollars worth of DLC for Payday 2, and that's after a massive price reduction. The game only has more DLC coming. By the end of it's run, in 2 years, we will have at current rates somewhere around 40-50 DLC. Overkill as a developer will attempt to gouge your wallet, and, to stress this, as of right now there are several gameplay features that will make it functionally impossible for you to survive if you do not buy certain DLC. This is a MAJOR PROBLEM. This comes in the form of enemies who are almost unstoppable unless one person in the party has the appropriate DLC weaponry. The DLC comes in three forms: Characters, weapons, and heists. The DLC characters have a tendency to be poorly written, paper thin national stereotypes. The Irish girl is Ireland personified and nothing else. Same as all the other nationality characters. The weapons are interesting if you're in to guns, but there are objective best and worst guns in this game and many of the DLC packs only offer niche, gimmick weapons that you likely won't even use. The heists are generally of a very high quality and are the only thing I consider worth it. If you're really in to the idea of playing a stereotypical Irish girl or a Japanese guy, go for it, but don't expect anything life changing. Advertising: This game is full of advertising. On the menu any DLC you do not have will be advertised to you in bright gold. There will be red icons denoting locked content because you don't have the DLC everywhere. The DLC content at this point has begun to dwarf the normal content and you will be constantly bombarded with DLC ads everywhere, even in the intro to the game. The only way to get the game to drop the advertising is to buy all the DLC. On top of this, there are characters and even entire levels that exist only to advertise other products. Jacket, a Hotline Miami character, is available, but only if you buy Hotline Miami 2's deluxe edition. Hotline Miami also has a DLC inspired by it, and several masks from it in the game. Crosspromotion of the highest order. There are also masks from the game Speedrunners, if you own that. There are also weapons from Chivalry, which even if you own Chivalry, you have to pay for. The Chivalry weapons are bad, lazy ports at that. Until you own all this then it will be locked and flaunted at you. Alesso, a musician who has nothing to do with Payday whatsoever, has a level dedicated to him. John Wick, a movie character who has nothing to do with Payday whatsoever, is in the game for no good reason other than to advertise John Wick the movie. Theming Issues: The game's theme is heisting, but it has broken that over and over again. Much of the DLC offers ridiculous, unfitting weapons that belong more in a Saint's Row game than in a heisting game. Including cowboy guns, flamethrowers, grenades, rocket launchers, miniguns, 'ninja' weapons, historical guns, and other garbage like that that doesn't belong. The heisters are practically invulnerable in universe and do whatever they want, which makes the game feel like there's no risk. Often, heists will make you feel more like a mercenary. Money feels like it has no value. Death feels like it has no real weight. Where the first game felt like a heist movie, this feels like...nothing. The characters barely communicate, and show next to no emotion over the loot that they score. They are never at real risk, in universe. Missing Content: Overkill has consistently promised to deliver content before taking extraordinary amounts of time to deliver it. We waited for the mysterious FBI Files for a year only to be given a basic in game wiki. We waited for a new enemy for a year to get a reskin of an existing one. A DLC promised secret content that we've been waiting on since spring. Safehouse Customization, something that was supposed to be in the game at release, is still not in the game, it's been two years now. Overkill frequently makes large promises to get you to do what it wants, before making you wait extraordinary amounts of time just to be disappointed. The game is missing voicelines that have yet to be added in for virtually every character. These basic things that any developer in their right mind would take care of are usually placed on the backburner to give you more awful, meaningless, quick buck DLC. Exclusive content is frequently made that the majority of players cannot obtain and unfortunately never will obtain. Card System: The Card System is one of the worst things in Payday. The game features a poor customization system made poorer by this: at the end of each level, you are given a choice of three cards that will 'randomly' give you an item, whether it's a weapon mod, mask, mask material, mask pattern, or color for mask patterns, You cannot make it more likely for any of these to come up, it is purely up to chance. However, it is also completely meaningless what card you pick, because as I understand, the result you get is already determind when you enter the screen, meaning it's all visual fluff. Considering the game has hundreds of masks, patterns, colors, materials, and weapon mods, this makes getting something specific that you want near impossible. Hundreds of hours can be spent before you'll get what you actually want. Since weapon mods now vastly outnumber everything else, you can expect to get this in the card screen the majority of the time and the majority of the time it basically means you might as well have got nothing because you have no use for it. Bad Stealth: The stealth system is laughably basic and broken. It is extremely trial and error and extremely possible to have the alarms go off, losing up to an entire hour of progress, because of something that wasn't even your fault. Often it will bug out and an enemy will spot you across the map for no reason at all. I've had an alarm blare for literally no reason at all. No enemies were alerted, lasers tripped, nothing had gone wrong and it went off. On top of that, there is no way to recover once a heist has gone loud, and since you will only have stealth skills and stealth loadouts, you stand no chance at surviving the rest of the heist and might as well restart. This is not a good stealth game, and should either abandon the premise or make a real effort to have stealth systems that virtually every stealth game has, like light detection, disguises, distractions, and so on. Bad Customization: Only worsened by the card system, the customization system is problematic. The masks the game features can be customized, but most customizations look downright ugly. It is extremely rare to get a combination that looks good. There is no suit customization, safehouse customization, no different outfits, you cannot visually customize weapons, you cannot create a heister. No UI customization, or menu customization. This is not highly customizable as it promotes itself as being. The developers have offered nothing but excuses in this area. Bad Skills: Many skills are passive and useless, especially in the stealth tree, offering buffs to silenced weapons which is useless since in stealth silencers one hit anyway. Bad Community: Elitist, rude players, most random players tend to be legendarily dumb. These are just a few of dozens of problems with the game and as it is, I would suggest you wait until things have improved before you buy this game.[/quote] This is my full review of Payday 2 that I posted at the beginning of the month. I would have written more and talked about the game in a general sense if it weren't for fucking character limits. Was it in protest? Yes. But I wrote it because I wanted someone to know if they go on that store page that the game has some serious fucking problems that need serious sorting out. And anyone browsing the store can read that and say well, y'know what, I don't give a shit, I don't care about DLC practices or customization, and buy it anyway. But I want them to know about it before they make that choice.

:snip: my merge

[QUOTE=Tsyolin;48976675]Basically how I feel, Payday 2 is a fantastic game that's been dreadfully soured by questionable business tactics and it makes it harder for me to want to play the game. It's a damn shame really. [editline]25th October 2015[/editline] I could disagree with parts of what you said but you've heard all of that already. However, I do think it's pretty much a unanimous opinion that the weapon re-balance really fucked a lot of the guns.[/QUOTE] Jacket's Piece and the UAR are still viable and those were all I ever used so I dunno.

[QUOTE=RichyZ;48976714]I dunno, the weapon rebalance needs some work but it finally got rid of Car-4 meta and DLC powercreep meta.[/QUOTE] Am I seriously the only one that never used the CAR-4? I just never found it to be a very interesting gun to use even if it had good stats.

the rebalance definitely needs to be reverted/changed, especially with what they did to poor shotguns that aren't secondaries.

[QUOTE=Tsyolin;48976736]Am I seriously the only one that never used the CAR-4? I just never found it to be a very interesting gun to use even if it had good stats.[/QUOTE] I used Car-4 to the point where I was bored with winning all the time and wanted a challenge so I started using other rifles like the gecko and gewher. It was really boringly OP.

[QUOTE=Tsyolin;48976736]Am I seriously the only one that never used the CAR-4? I just never found it to be a very interesting gun to use even if it had good stats.[/QUOTE] I always found the specific combination of its slow ROF and spray pattern hard to shoot. :V I am not good at FPS.

Is there any particular reason why I can't reliably get critical hits any more?

[QUOTE=Tsyolin;48976736]Am I seriously the only one that never used the CAR-4? I just never found it to be a very interesting gun to use even if it had good stats.[/QUOTE] I used one every so often, but never really enjoyed it because AR-15s are just such boring, generic guns. I'm glad other guns are better now, I can enjoy using stuff like the L85, G3, RPK and other, more interesting guns without being held back by their stat problems.

Am I the only one now who thinks the game is a bit too easy now? If you get a half decent team even deathwish is easy. I feel as if bulldozers might need a buff too, they're just become a tan cop with a bit more health and damage.

[QUOTE=TechnoSandwic;48976784]Am I the only one now who thinks the game is a bit too easy now? If you get a half decent team even deathwish is easy. I feel as if bulldozers might need a buff too, they're just become a tan cop with a bit more health and damage.[/QUOTE] They should sprint like PDTH. I'm serious, they move so slow that they're just walking targets, they need to haul ass and get in close before you can react.

[QUOTE=Starlight 456;48976798]They should sprint like PDTH. I'm serious, they move so slow that they're just walking targets, they need to haul ass and get in close before you can react.[/QUOTE] I think only Green dozers should do that, would at least make them more threatening.

It'd be interesting if higher difficulties did more tactics like that. Imagine if on deathwish it was roughly the same as overkill, but instead, on maps like Rats, they busted through the roof of the meth lab, making it super hard to hold out.

I just want them to revert back primary shotguns since aside from the Izhma and Predator, they were balanced and each had its own role i.e M1014 as an accurate HE stunner Raven as an alternative to the Macaroni in Fugiforcer builds Reinfield for general use especially with the high damage that 000 used to give Macaroni for max damage Fugiforcin' Joce for longer ranged macaroni with little multikilling potential AA-12 for pure DPS

[QUOTE=Zombie Strider;48976810]It'd be interesting if higher difficulties did more tactics like that. Imagine if on deathwish it was roughly the same as overkill, but instead, on maps like Rats, they busted through the roof of the meth lab, making it super hard to hold out.[/QUOTE] I kind of wish they had tactics at all honestly. For the most part, the AI's only tactic is to pile up, run in, and die. Maybe with a shield in front. It's probably too much to ask for, but I'd way rather have a few extremely deadly swat members with strategy than a thousand cops that are less durable than porcelain

[QUOTE=Starlight 456;48976798]They should sprint like PDTH. I'm serious, they move so slow that they're just walking targets, they need to haul ass and get in close before you can react.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE=RichyZ;48976800]The problem with difficulty in this game is inherent to how they balanced the difficulty settings, the fact that DW enemies do tons more damage and take more hits is lame as fuck, they should instead employ more snipers, or use more damaging tactics, or breach walls that would normally be untouched. Maybe even add uncommon enemies to spice up OVK/DW, i.e. tear gas throwers or even a dumb flamethrower unit because why not.[/QUOTE] I'd really like the dozer sprint to come back from PD:TH and Payday 2 beta, maybe they walk around at the start but they'll do an occasional dash towards you. It'd also be cool for enemies, rather than do more damage, instead group behind specials, be more accurate and trigger happy. Finally, I feel as if different weapon stats and even situations would be cool. Less ammo, slower reload, more recoil, chances for your gun to jam or overheat (Would be interesting for LMGs) and so on.

tbh having everything sprinting on DW would be enough to satisfy me along with unpredictable shit like HRT black dudes being removed [editline]25th October 2015[/editline] Speaking of HRT, they should really move stealthily like Cloakers (using vents and shit) and rescue hostages while other cop units suppress/zergrush you instead of being a part of the meat going into the grinder

On top of difficulty, I feel as if guns need an overhaul. Not a rebalance, an overhaul. From what I've heard, DMCWO did it extremely well, with different ammo types, damage dropoffs and more. I dunno what's happened with it, the gunplay seemed to be so good at first, I guess it's just the Ctrl+V weapon stats that are DLC weapons have made it bland.

[QUOTE=Derp123213;48976822]I just want them to revert back primary shotguns since aside from the Izhma and Predator, they were balanced and each had its own role i.e M1014 as an accurate HE stunner Raven as an alternative to the Macaroni in Fugiforcer builds Reinfield for general use especially with the high damage that 000 used to give Macaroni for max damage Fugiforcin' Joce for longer ranged macaroni with little multikilling potential AA-12 for pure DPS[/QUOTE] I really want to know what Overkill were thinking when they did the shotgun part of the rebalance. It's like ok, assault rifles, split them up by damage, make them all do above breakpoints and make them moddable for either high accuracy or high stability but not both, sounds good. Then they get to shotguns and just go "You know what, I think shotguns should do less damage than everything else and have much less ammo than assault rifles"

I'm just here waiting to DMC's Weapon Overhaul to update and once again forget Overkill's idea of balance.

Honestly the weapon rebalance is not too bad. Except for shotguns, compared to the pre-balance I feel like I'm using a leafblower against a solid concrete wall when using one. Other than that I'm glad the meta got broken and you don't get to see people running CAR-4s only on Death Wish and berating you for not using one of the 3 or 4 meta guns (I thought we left that asinine mentality behind about 2 weeks after the death wish update). I finally have an excuse to run around with a PSG-1 or my SCAR-H :v: and bring back the astronaut.

the biggest sin of this crimefest is that it should've been bigger and better than the last one but most of the days were shitty masks, shit that shouldn't be a "reward" and microtransactions

[QUOTE=HAKKAR!!!;48977110]the biggest sin of this crimefest is that it should've been bigger and better than the last one but most of the days were shitty masks, shit that shouldn't be a "reward" and microtransactions[/QUOTE] To be fair we got a decent weapon rebalance which only has a real problem with shotguns, and two classic heists and an okayish mini heist. It was kind of lame though. I wonder how they'll handle the game from this point on.

To all people saying that the core game is unchanged: Indeed it isn't, the problem there is that we've been shown that OVK is completely alright with treating their community like garbage. Surely there were a few accidents before, but fucking up (And fucking up on purpose!) the most anticipated update of the year is just unacceptable. As I said, even though the devs were a bit unethical at times, I believed that they'll completely redeem themselves on Crimefest. Well, let's say they quite didn't.

[QUOTE=doommarine23;48977139]To be fair we got a decent weapon rebalance which only has a real problem with shotguns, and two classic heists and an okayish mini heist. It was kind of lame though. I wonder how they'll handle the game from this point on.[/QUOTE] The weapon rebalance really shouldn't have been a big thing. It has its merits but it would be much better if they worked on this stuff all the time. Like, instead of waiting for crimefest to do something for free, gradually take a look at how each weapon performs and what you could do with them. Maybe spend a month tweaking shotguns, with frequent patches so you can use the feedback from the community. Then next month you do something with assault rifles. I don't know, it might not be possible, but it'd be cool if every gun was unique in some way, rather than the way they have it now which is like 'sets' of weapons that all hit around the same damage and may as well just be skins of the same gun.

So apparently there's going to be an AMA going on soon and I've written up a couple paragraphs that I'd like to discuss with whoever is doing it. Would anyone care to read it and help me pare it to something appropriate for the AMA?

I [I]really[/I] like the Danger Ahead skin. [t]http://i.imgur.com/4VT69Kk.jpg[/t][t]http://i.imgur.com/s0kBk3p.jpg[/t]

Day 1 of crimefest was mega rough. Also I like the doge mask, makes me wish there was one in wich the dog isn't winking.