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[UnluckyKate]

I started playing Payday 2 with my buddy and we're having a blast for the first couple of hours. The rush of adrenaline of a heist going all loud, the civilian, the mask, the waves of cops, that fucking drill taking 300 seconds to crack open a safe, always have to fix it, the loud music, the shootbangs, the loot, the loading in the van and the gateway with a final shootout in the street. It's amazing.

expect, after that, it's always the same. Sure different heist, different level, randomized patrol, camera placement, safe placement, etc... But it get tedious VERY VERY fast to always wait 300+ seconds for every godamm safe to open and have another jail to drill insinde the same. AND THEN take like 30 seconds to open a deposit box totally blind having no idea if you will get a bag of cash, a ring, some gold bar or a stupid worthless book or empty box.

Going in stealthy ? Impossible with only the two of us. We tried really hard with me playing ghost and there is just too much too handle. Civilian, guards, security cams, security room, security dude in the security room under a 180 seconds drill time, the PAGERS you have to answer, the entire civilian crowd you must control at all time, FUCKING nearbywalkers seeing you through the windows calling cops... It always go loud and you end up shooting endless was of robocops, aimbox wallhacking snipers and taser guys, riot shield hulks and near invicible full IED bullet proof suits.

Sure, i get it. You need the sawblade to crack open the deposit boxes like nuts, but it's locked just before the last skills, it is behind a huge grind fest of money and skill points. Same for basically all classes.

I just don't get it. I just hit a HUGE ass wall as a difficulty curve. I don't know what to do. Just give up ? Because either we keep farming Mallcrashers for 10 hours for cashs for better weapons (and still have random duplicate mods as rewards) or try to go in higher difficulty but the two of us are getting our ass handed over badly in most scenarios.

The problem is also that Skills cost money. SHIT TONS of money. Guns and mods are insanely expensive. you grind, you get cash, you want to upgrade your specs, you can. Maybe. You can to get a new gun ? Half a million bucks for a new AR ? almost a million for the last SMG/Pistol ? 200k for a redot ? Seriously ? It doesn't make ANY sens at all. Why would you want to ruin yourself for a new gun that is less efficient than your modded basic rifle and you don't have the money nor the mods unlocked to upgrade it later.

Also, you drop mods you already have. And you can't trade as far as I know.

I just don't get this game. SO MUCH amazing idea, great great concept and most of it good execution but then it just falls appart in the long run, once you coverted all the heists because the difficulty curves, rewards/progress and entire design is just broken.

Or am I missing something ?

 

[Cheddahz]

Thanks for getting all of my thoughts into one post

 

[BattleMonkey]

Without the grind, what would keep people Coming back?

 

[TheSeks]

Yeah, I love it. But I admit it has flaws. The major problems for me is:

-Like you said: Stealth is really impossible for lower player counts which dovetails into:
-Lower playercount heists are damn near impossible even on Normal. The AI (THANKFULLY) revives you this outing, something they didn't do in PD2 but some heists like the CS:GO Bank heist is nearly impossible to do by yourself on Normal if you're trying to "Plan B/C" them (take the moneybags through the sewers for Plan C).

Stealth is too focused on by the player base for the sake of avoiding the 300 second drills (better than the 20000-70000 second/20-50min drill for "Overdrill" in PD1 however) to where if you fail the stealth good luck completing the mission itself because you didn't set yourself up for going loud/having a mix of the two due to the wonky "detection" system.

Oh and the Chromatic Abberation and ADS Zoom that makes iron-sights completely worthless because it blurs/zooms the sights instead of the outside view. FFS, Starbreeze/Overkill/505.

You really shouldn't have problems with money if you're going for the most bags/crew-alive bonuses. Double so with the skills. The major problem with the skill system is:

1) Later skills are either entirely worthless/redundant (Ghost tree, hi!) or too expensive in investment to where you have to "specialize" as a class instead of a mix of them.
2) Most skills are either really good (Endurance and the Endurance recharge speed both aced means you can sprint pretty far and often with the heaviest without a skill Armor on) or entirely bad/redundant (again: Ghost skills, Lockpicking when you can just use C4/Sawblades/ECM to open most anything quicker than the lockpick)

The only time Money is a problem is if you're trying to do PrOverkill Rats to boost your levels for the sake of skill points. That eats into your Offshore money really fast because they stupidly made making your own heists/match a money cost thing compared to PD1.

 

[Charcoal]

Love the game to death. Got over 30M in DA bank and a gun range in my basement. I think I'm doing pretty well for myself.

Definitely looking forward to more heists though.

 

[CheesecakeRecipe]

Overkill singlehandedly ruined it by taking a very antagonistic attitude towards everyone who wasn't the 1% super hardcore and patched the game to be even more of a grind than it was in beta and immediately after launch. So many issues with character builds being essentially rendered useless band-aid patched to be acceptable, and then shat on by the addition of something like a safe that cannot be lockpicked or C4'd.

The heists themselves suffer from lack of adequate rewards for anyone past a certain level and being nearly impossible to stealth solo/duo unless you have a very exact build. And then you're getting into needing to re-spec and all of this needless shit involving the money system. Money to buy parts, money to buy heists to bypass the insanely broken crime.net system, money to buy skills, money to buy guns, etc.

And the card system? Fuck that noise. There are still some parts I've not gotten after ~200+ hours of beta and retail. And don't tell me I just got unlucky with the RNG, after having played that long I god damn better just have the parts I want or need.

It is my opinion that David Goldfarb is both the best and worst thing to happen to the Payday 2 team. He brought forth a lot of skills from DICE but seems wholly incapable of being anything but toxic to his own game. And if I were to ask him why he decided to do x instead of y, I would have my twitter blocked and my account would be mocked for several posts after.

Payday: The Heist was one of my favorite co-op experiences and Payday 2 was pretty much on the course for being the best thing to happen for me and yet somehow with each new patch (which by the way, on PC is one of the least acceptable patching systems I've ever encountered. Why are you copying all 30 gigs of the game for a 100MB patch?!) they introduced more and more that made me hate playing it, hate Overkill software for completely misunderstanding what it is their game needed and want to just distance myself from it entirely. Damn shame. Sorry for the rant here, but I haven't really had the opportunity to talk about how much this game has gone down the shitter.

 

[Omega]

Without the grind, what would keep people Coming back?

there's people still playing quake 3 and CS 1.6. what keeps them coming back? something called good gameplay, which is absent from this interactive movie era we're in

I agree with the OP. I love the game (I have somewhere like 170 hours in the game) but I just got so bored with it.

GO Bank is a welcome change to the game. Can't just ECM rush it, Control Freak it, etc. You actually have to work as a team. Hopefully they add more missions like this to bring some life back into the game, because as it stands now, the only mission worth playing is Rats, whether it's legit or an EXP/money run.

also, it being completely, 100% RNG based is the dumbest thing ever. I don't think there's a single thing in this game that doesn't involve RNG. fuck that shit.

 

[TheSeks]

Overkill singlehandedly ruined it by taking a very antagonistic attitude towards everyone who wasn't the 1% super hardcore and patched the game to be even more of a grind than it was in beta and immediately after launch. So many issues with character builds being essentially rendered useless band-aid patched to be acceptable, and then shat on by the addition of something like a safe that cannot be lockpicked or C4'd.

Huh? I haven't ran into any besides the safe-deposit boxes and ATMs. One of which is Saw/Lock-pick only (makes sense in theory) and the other ECM only (no saws).

And the card system? Fuck that noise. There are still some parts I've not gotten after ~200+ hours of beta and retail. And don't tell me I just got unlucky with the RNG, after having played that long I god damn better just have the parts I want or need.

Agreed. The card-drop system is awful.

My ideal Payday would be:

Payday 1's skill system (thereby EVERYONE at max level has everything unlocked and doesn't have to "respect" shit outside of heists missions specific stuff), Payday 1/2's mixture of heists (I fucking hate Heat Street, for instance. But more bank heists like CS:GO, PD1/2's default banks would be nice), Payday 2's gunplay (with fixed ironsights), and no Chromatic Aberation.

Oh and fix the grind. It was bad in PD1 to the point where you had to do Overdrill runs on ONE MAP ONLY to jump levels. Whereas PD2 has a variety of heists, but doesn't pay enough EXP to make doing them all worth it. So you have to do basically the same thing as PD1: Pro Job, Overkill difficulty, Rats.

Day 1-> Blow the Meth Lab as quick as you can if you're doing it for EXP. Then do Day 2->Shoot the dealers, get the info quickly. Day 3->GTFO before the cops kill you. Get to the bus, grab a money bag, haul ass to extract. Repeat.

And then realize that you doing the contracts to run these for the sake of levels eats into your money too much to make the grinding anything but an endless treadmill.

 

[snoopeasystreet]

Without the grind, what would keep people Coming back?

Enjoyable mechanics and systems. If the grind is the only reason someone is compelled to play a game then the game has to be deemed a failure. I do think there should be some kind of weapon/skill progression in a game like this, because you want to feel like you're getting better and better at heists but if some arbitrary number is holding content from a player then that's straight up bullshit.

 

[GamingIsDead]

Without the grind, what would keep people Coming back?

If you have to ask you it's probably too late for you. I'm sorry that you have been indoctrinated.

I enjoy payday 2 for the challenge and fun in the heists themselves not getting xp/money and tactical purple monkey dildos you get to put on your guns. It would be far more enjoyable if all the weapons and attachments were unlocked from the start or at the very least less grind involved.

I liked the fact they updated to the game to make the hiest much less exploitable and easy (like Ukrainian job) but they really need to make stealthing some missions much easier and less luck based, for example i find stealthing the bank is way harder then doing all of framing frame stealth.

 

[TheSeks]

Let's be honest: Stealth as a system is just bad. It requires your entire team to answer pagers constantly but you have a limit (compared to PD1's "No Mercy" stealth where one person could answer the phone while everyone else did the other stuff as quick as they could with no limit on the pager/phone) or have a skill to increase it slightly for one person (which again: Terrible skill in general to invest in because it isn't really needed most of the time) to where you can't put someone that is focused on keeping people quiet/silent and answering pagers as a job. Add in the fact that most guns raise your concealment detection meter levels to 75 no matter what you do to try to lower it (even putting a suit on keeps those guns at 75. WTF?), and yeah...

GO Bank is a welcome change to the game. Can't just ECM rush it, Control Freak it, etc. You actually have to work as a team. Hopefully they add more missions like this to bring some life back into the game, because as it stands now, the only mission worth playing is Rats, whether it's legit or an EXP/money run.

You kinda have to "ECM" Rush the CS:GO bank to start it as a stealth. I've had people shoot all the civilians and the guards after doing 2 ECM's to knock the cameras offline and then shoot the cameras as well just to be on the safe-side, leaving the randomly/infinite (IIRC) spawning civilians outside to worry about for the rest of the heist. While it's a good change of pace, I wouldn't say it fixed most issues.

 

[NullPointer]

Without the grind, what would keep people Coming back?

I've been seeing this a lot lately and it always makes my eye twitch. As if a game cannot have lasting value without a long grind to unlock gameplay items.

Its just not true. Case in point: Almost every game in existence.

It turns what could be played for enjoyment into another occupation where players devise the most efficient tasks and methods to make the most credits through repetition.

If this was all some kind of virtual work ethic training for kids I'd almost understand.

Edit: On second thought, forcing the player into the mindset o how to make the most buck for the bang is probably a good thing for this particular game. But my point still stands that you can have replayability without grinds.

 

[CheesecakeRecipe]

Huh? I haven't ran into any besides the safe-deposit boxes and ATMs. One of which is Saw/Lock-pick only (makes sense in theory) and the other ECM only (no saws).

It may only show up after a certain difficulty level, but there are safes that are silver colored that have "Suck it" written by the lock mechanism which have no other option but to be drilled which fucks stealthers and speed runners alike.

Let's be honest: Stealth as a system is just bad. It requires your entire team to answer pagers constantly but you have a limit (compared to PD1's "No Mercy" stealth where one person could answer the phone while everyone else did the other stuff as quick as they could with no limit on the pager/phone) or have a skill to increase it slightly for one person (which again: Terrible skill in general to invest in because it isn't really needed most of the time) to where you can't put someone that is focused on keeping people quiet/silent and answering pagers as a job. Add in the fact that most guns raise your concealment detection meter levels to 75 no matter what you do to try to lower it (even putting a suit on keeps those guns at 75. WTF?), and yeah...

Agreed, the pagers devalue a lot of the ghost tree and force you to need a mastermind and even then it just sucks.

 

[Tagyhag]

I agree with your post, but based on anecdotal evidence, the game is simply much better with 3 other friends.

Like you said, there's only so much you can do with just 2 of you coordinating.

All I could tell you is either find 2 more people to play it with, or try to break through that wall.

 

[TheSeks]

...I haven't seen those. Do you know the heist/difficulty you ran into those on? Maybe they patched those out later, or maybe someone LUA scripted your session since LUA scripts are able to run rampant online. :/ I honestly haven't seen that in my 20-80 hours played.

 

[PedroLumpy]

I have no idea why they love their shitty grinds so much. They've made their game worse in their attempts to stop people 'farming', because we got to put a stop to that for ... reasons.

Without the grind, what would keep people Coming back?

I know I judge a games quality based on how many bars I get to fill.

 

[CheesecakeRecipe]

...I haven't seen those. Do you know the heist/difficulty you ran into those on? Maybe they patched those out later, or maybe someone LUA scripted your session since LUA scripts are able to run rampant online. :/ I honestly haven't seen that in my 20-80 hours played.

They're in there, as I understand like everything else in this stupid game there's an RNG element to if you'll run into one on a heist or not. Titan Class Safes have respective versions for each size/shape safe in the game, though it looks like they have been limited to certain heists since their introduction.

 

[Coffee Dog]

The game flatlines once you get to the end of your skill tree. Once you can feasibly do most heists on overkill the remaining few are stupid hard and its not worth trying to grind up.

But oh man, considering the game is like $20 pretty frequently, the ride to that point is damn worth it. Great core gameplay and killer music.

 

[TheSeks]

Agreed, the pagers devalue a lot of the ghost tree and force you to need a mastermind and even then it just sucks.

The entire Ghost Tree kinda sucks, I feel. And I say this as someone that invested pretty heavily into it hoping to get a silent "saw" ability on the safe-deposit boxes and maybe more ECM's to carry for the ATMs. As it is, you get one extra ECM (IIRC you can't refill them from ammo drops) for ATMs or feedback loops (which last too short to be worth such a late-skill-tree investment) and the lockpick speeds up but like 2-5 seconds but is still slower than just C4'ing doors/safes (like Rats Day 2) and the Saw (most anywhere) outside of the fact that it's the "silent" option.

Too bad half the time something screws up your stealth (either a player or completely bad luck) to where that skill-tree is made redundant in "going loud."

I blame it on the fact that Overkill didn't rearrange the stuff. They say they're "looking into making the ghost tree more useful" but who the fuck knows if that's possible.

It's kinda funny; I like the game and I don't mind the BC2/DICE employee coming into it as a lead, double-so since he/PD2's PC demo completely reversed my opinion on the series (so much in fact that on a second look I kinda enjoy PD1 despite all it's faults/what turned me away from it) but it really seems that the people that left DICE since Bad Company 2 (which I also love with all my heart) have either completely lost the plot in what makes a good FPS or are at DICE still and working on buggy titles (hi, BF4 <3) for their corporate masters instead of having 2-4 years of breathing space to make their stuff shine like BC2.