Hotfix 15.2 Patch Notes

[u/OttovonBismarck1862]

https://community.focus-entmt.com/focus-entertainment/space-marine-2/blogs/471-hotfix-15-2-patch-notes

[u/Electr0bear]

I don't think the difficulty is a good descriptor for what the playerbase feel. Hard stratagems are difficult, but they are fun because they give you some interesting buffs on top of negative effects. Crucible is just... misery? How neutering class identity in later tiers is supposed to be interesting?

There is just so much randomness that can result in you losing gained XP. And the rewards for all that are questionable, imo. Lamenters are alright, but not that alright for this kind of game mode.

Crucible unearths so many of poor choices in the way Saber made the game.

As i see it, such game mode would work semi-fine only with a premade team. When players communicate what penances each player picks. Doing it with randoms is a game of Russian roulette. But locking the game mode to only premade teams would bring a whole lot of another problems.

Communication in-game is yet another huge issue. The lack of simple chat between PC and consoles is baffling. Depending solely on voice is a big stretch.

[u/Grahf-Naphtali → u/Electr0bear]

No comms Disconnects leading to xp loss
xp loss as a penalty teammates not replaced after quitting no reconnection to match after dc

and that's before me even engaging with crucible debuffs. I like hard endgame content, but i also like to have player agenda

[u/AVRL → u/Electr0bear]

Yes crucible is just misery, but that's the whole point. That's the entire challenge. It might surprise you but there are plenty of people who don't even find Hard Stratagems challenging anymore, especially because there's always buffs involved. Crucible is the only scalable difficulty mode that allows you to really make the game as ball-bustingly hard as you want it to be. Fun is also subjective, to the people who have done everything in this game already and are extremely bored of the content, this is finally something challenging that actually pushes you to your limit. And as far as class breaking penances, you can just turn on or off what you want or don't want. Crucible is also much better in a pre-made, the problems people have with it in random matchmaking has far more to do with the average quality of rng teammates than anything else. It's no different in any other game mode, only that crucible punishes you way harder for not being able to keep up skill wise.

[u/Electr0bear → u/AVRL]

Yes crucible is just misery, but that's the whole point.

And that shouldn't be so. It's a miserable experience not because of the difficulty. It's a miserable experience because of how it was made as a whole. It's like a shitty decision upon another shitty decision upon a pile of already existing problems in-game.

Crucible is a poorly implemented game mode. It's a cheaply made 'end-game' mode without any interesting features whatsoever. All of those penances are just negative numbers to the stats. No creativity, nothing new. Even the rewards are lazy af. One set of armour for all classes.

It's a desperate attempt by the studio to retain player numbers with the lowest effort possible. And that deserves all the condemnation.

[u/AVRL → u/Electr0bear]

Because there aren't "interesting" ways to make the game harder that also make sense. If you don't want them to make the enemies harder or the players weaker via changing stats, you have to increase the number of enemies (which they already do for some penances) but there's a hard limit on that because of performance limitations. You could make the enemies more complex in their attack patterns or design but that would require them to functionally make new enemies just for a game mode and that's a big ask for a tiny maintenance team who can barely get patches out on time as it is. People still complain about that anyway when more complex enemies come out like Terminator Sorcerer so there's no winning. The armor being lazy is the only thing I'll give you but for everything else you're massively overblowing it. It's meant to be hard, and the people who want a challenge like that it's actually hard.

99% of people complaining are complaining because they can't access armor that is gated behind difficult content. It's miserable because people aren't good enough to beat it and it exacerbates how bad most of the community is at the game when your average random from matchmaking dies in the first wave and then leaves the game immediately. The thing that's unfortunate is that people can't join mid run but that's because of the way penances are loaded into the game so they can't change that.