"It's not Arma at the end of the day" - Helldivers 2's new CEO responds to calls for more gear stat "transparency"

The new CEO at Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has wasted no time introducing himself to the game's community - heading over to Reddit to drop a bit of an essay. Naturally, some players have fairly taken this as an oppportunity to ask for his input on some of the current hot topics surrounding the game - one of these being the matter of transparency when it comes to the hard numbers behind gear.

If you missed it, Arrowhead's recently been busy faciliating a CEO switch from Johan Pilestedt to Shams Jorjani, with the aim of letting the former focus more heavily on helping develop Helldivers 2. And, as players wait to see whether the latest developments in the Galactic War are - as is being speculated - paving the way for the Illuminate to finally arrive, Jorjani's decided to say hello to them.

In a pretty lengthy post on the Helldivers subreddit, Jorjani provided a lot of background on himself and his friendship with Pilestedt and emphasised that "the ship will stay on the same course, despite the change in captain", with its former Jack Sparrow taking on the role of "being the Obi-wan to many 'Lukes' in our studio". Basically, Pilestedt'll be helping advise and consult with the developers as they enact tweaks or create new stuff.

On a similar note, one of the many player concerns addressed by Jorjani via the replies to the post involves the level of "transparency" offered by Arrowhead when it comes to the raw data behind the game's gear - weapons especially. "Rather than asking about any specific balance changes, I ask for more of the balancing knobs to be visible to the player," wrote user zeddypanda, who presides over a webpage dedicated to Heeldivers 2 guns, "I think transparency will help catch misbalanced items before they're released or quickly after, and promote honest discourse among all."

Their pitch is that letting players see the likes of damage and blast radius stats in-game could help prevent the instances of distrust that've cropped up between some members of the community and developers when it comes to nerfs - which zeddypanda believes need to be communicated better.

"Ok - so first off - super appreciate you putting in the work. Not every hero wears a cape," Jorjani responded. "I'm not going to pretend I'm plugged in enough to follow along in the inside baseball stuff you've got going but I'll say this. I think it's good that players have a good understanding of how things work - but some of it should be fuzzy IMO. Otherwise the magic disappears a bit. While we have a lot of milsim feel to the game, it's not Arma at the end of the day."

He closed by adding: "Transparency solves some issues - but it also brings more scrutiny. I'd love for Johan and I to discuss this on a stream in the future."

So, it sounds like we'll probably be getting a bit more discussion about the degree to which helldivers see how the sausage is made at some point in the future - here's hoping a solution can be found that'll lead to Arrowhead facing less toxicity.