Payday 2 introduced a really shady P2W lottery. Please reconsider the idle thumbs curation!

[Smart Jason]

So, Overkill kind of doubled down and now, in addition to stat boosts on weapons, the gun skins also give team-wide payout bonuses (minuscule percentage buffs on XP and cash after missions). This is actually better I guess than the (arguably pay to win, blah blah blah) stat boosts and really what they should have done in the first place. Now it's just another RNG thing to hope for when you unlock crates. And this was all rolled out as the secret Completely Overkill item that's been promised to the people who spent $20 during the Hype Train event a year ago - meaning those guys got a random weapon skin with this bonus as their long-awaited reward (read: purchase). It could be for any of the twenty-five weapons in the roll-out, obviously meaning one possibly that they never use, and to make things truly endearing - the arbitrary quality rarity still applies, so their skins come out with a cosmetic shittiness rating completely randomly. (Xtansic from the board posted screenshots of his uncrating and his weapon was Broken In quality, for instance.)

 

Probably because I can't stop playing Fallout 4 anyway, this got me to uninstall the game.

[Gormongous]

So, Overkill kind of doubled down and now, in addition to stat boosts on weapons, the gun skins also give team-wide payout bonuses (minuscule percentage buffs on XP and cash after missions). This is actually better I guess than the (arguably pay to win, blah blah blah) stat boosts and really what they should have done in the first place. Now it's just another RNG thing to hope for when you unlock crates. And this was all rolled out as the secret Completely Overkill item that's been promised to the people who spent $20 during the Hype Train event a year ago - meaning those guys got a random weapon skin with this bonus as their long-awaited reward (read: purchase). It could be for any of the twenty-five weapons in the roll-out, obviously meaning one possibly that they never use, and to make things truly endearing - the arbitrary quality rarity still applies, so their skins come out with a cosmetic shittiness rating completely randomly. (Xtansic from the board posted screenshots of his uncrating and his weapon was Broken In quality, for instance.)

 

Probably because I can't stop playing Fallout 4 anyway, this got me to uninstall the game.

 

Yeah... It's been a very peculiar situation. As several news outlets have reported, the moderators on the Steam forums for Payday 2 went on strike in response to the Completely Overkill Pack's release. After some cajoling, the game's lead producer Almir Listo agreed to an interview with the lead moderator, known as "Ashley," and what resulted was

that I've ever heard. Near the end, Ashley even asked Listo to summarize the points and promises that he'd made and he refused, because he'd failed to say anything substantive beyond "We're unhappy with the community's response" and "We'll look into communicating better in the future." Ashley seems to be an optimist, because she was sufficiently satisfied by just getting to talk to Listo that she resumed her duties as a mod, saying that she'd quit for good if Listo and Overkill go back on their promises one more time. To that end, she's signed an NDA with Overkill that functionally makes her an unpaid community manager. There are a lot of concerns floating around, but I'll quote the best of them:

 

So basically Almir just hired you as their new community manager, 'cept you're not getting paid? You've already assumed all the responsibilities a community manager has! What aren't you doing that a paid community manager would be? I really don't know that this was a good decision... and I'm not talking about "for the community" here, I'm talking about for you personally...

• It puts you in a position of relative weakness - Unless I'm mistaken, you'll be performing the exact same role as before, but with even greater responsibility: the new expectation that you won't be able to discuss certain topics, you've gained a responsibility to Overkill but they have no new responsibility to you, which leads me to
• You have assumed additional responsibility without receiving anything in return - Overkill just got something of value from you, what exactly did they give you in return, other than the promise that this allows them to give you inside information that you then cannot share? But, most importantly
• Neither party has any obligation to the other since you're not being paid - Meaning they can simply ignore you and fail to keep you in the loop, but you're still beholden to the contract.

 

Further note that Listo and Overkill have a history of making promises to involve members of the community in their development, making them sign NDAs, and then letting them sit under that gag doing nothing until they give up and go away. That's what happened with PDStats, the creator of which signed an NDA in exchange for being promised with an advisory role integrating his mod into the new "FBI Files" in Payday 2 but who ended up ignored by Overkill for half a year and then going broke maintaining the mod. Also, in general, it's really just great that one of Overkill's first efforts towards community transparency after Crimefest 2015 is an NDA with a prominent community leader...

 

I'm glad that I've mostly stopped playing this game. The game itself — the skin drops, the new shooting model with more engine-mandated misses built in, the strangled mod community — is bad enough, but these developers are building a trapdoor in the bottom of their boat to hold more treasure and it's just going to sink them faster.

[Dewar]

I think I'm going to pretend that I didn't make the stupid decision of buying $15 of DLC when it was on sale last month and quietly uninstall this.

[hirn1appen]

So, Overkill kind of doubled down and now, in addition to stat boosts on weapons, the gun skins also give team-wide payout bonuses (minuscule percentage buffs on XP and cash after missions). This is actually better I guess than the (arguably pay to win, blah blah blah) stat boosts and really what they should have done in the first place. Now it's just another RNG thing to hope for when you unlock crates.

I don't agree it's a lot better than the stat boosts: the bonus only applies to the long-term player progression rather than to the missions themselves. I can understand why that appears not quite as onerous as the stat boosts, but it's still worthy of protest in my book.

 

Fort completeness' sake: Almir Listo, Overkill's PR guy has publicly apologized for "all the distress we've caused the past few weeks", without going into any detail. In particular, he did not outline any measures to be taken to rectify the situation, just some discussions that are to take place with some community members in the future.

So it's nice to see that they acknowledge that they have messed up, but at the same time the entire statement is very unimpressive, given that in lieu of any meaningful announcements of changes, it could very well just be empty rhethoric.

[Gormongous]

Fort completeness' sake: Almir Listo, Overkill's PR guy has publicly apologized for "all the distress we've caused the past few weeks", without going into any detail. In particular, he did not outline any measures to be taken to rectify the situation, just some discussions that are to take place with some community members in the future.

So it's nice to see that they acknowledge that they have messed up, but at the same time the entire statement is very unimpressive, given that in lieu of any meaningful announcements of changes, it could very well just be empty rhethoric.

 

I enjoyed the summation of the apology in one of the comments to the Destructoid article about it.

"We hear you. We know you're mad. We know WHY you're mad. We're totally gonna make the reason you're mad more fun!"

[Bjorn]

It kinda reminds me a number of years ago during one of the many firestorms about the shittiness of Missouri highways when MODOT announced they would be running a new $5 million PR campaign to convince people that the roads weren't as bad as they thought they were.  Instead of, you know, spending that money on actually fixing the broken ass roads. 

[hirn1appen]

I enjoyed the summation of the apology in one of the comments to the Destructoid article about it.

Yeah. Of course, they could be serious about changing course, but without taking action, a plan or even any concrete mention of what they did wrong, this is indistinguishable from the typical non-pology. Sadly, given their history that's what we have to assume for the time being.

[hirn1appen]

And - surprise - yesterday it was revealed that they "currently have no plans of removing the stat boosts".