10 Things Seriously Wrong With Payday 3
Intro
Payday 3 has been officially out for 50 days as of the time of this recording, and its player count trajectory has been rather depressing to look at on its finest day payday 3 accumulated. 69, 000 concurrent players on Steam alone, and that's not accounting for epic games, consoles, etc.; the game easily had well over 100, 000 concurrent players, probably near 200, 000.
And yet today I looked at Payday's three-player count out of curiosity, and I came across this: yep, that's 700 concurrent players; that's like less than Stronghold Crusader HD. This game is 21 years old, and it's got nearly 100 more concurrent players right now than Payday 3 on Steam, or a better comparison being that Payday 3's predecessor.
Payday 2, currently has 30, 000 players, well over 40 times the number of players. Payday 3 currently has 40 times, which means even if there's 10 times as many players playing Payday 3 off Steam, that still wouldn't come anywhere near Payday 2's numbers, and let's be real, there aren't 10 times as many players playing Payday 3 off Steam anyways without any further ado. Clearly, something is wrong with Payday 3, so in this article, let's go over 10 things seriously wrong with Payday 3, first with.
Dev communication
Lack of dev communication with the community I think the developers failed to realize how much we, the payday 3 community, care about their game, and we want to see it truly succeed.
I've been part of many gaming communities back in my day, and I can see the payday community is one of the most loyal and caring communities for their own game. I was not a payday player in the Payday 2 era; I was a counterstrike player back then, but with Payday 3. I've since moved to Payday, and I can see the passion that the community has for it.
It's actually quite an amazing site to see. With that being said, I think it's really important that the developers communicate. As little as they do with their own community. I mean, a few weeks ago, the developers said this: We've discovered critical errors with our update pipeline shortly after the game was released, and there was a significant risk to player progression.
We would be wiped out if we didn't address this and ensure a solid test environment, and upon that statement, the entire community understood. They understood that the developers were struggling with their update, and the community respected that because that's what the community wants. Even if you're struggling, owning up to it and communicating with your community will only make them care more for you. It's better to do that than neglect them and leave them in the dark to make up their own assumptions about what's going on with payday.
Mod support
3 Next up is the lack of moderator support. I could go on for like 30 minutes about mod support, as mod support has endless potential for a game, but I'll keep it short: why is there no mod support?
As I mentioned earlier, I was not a Payday 2 player; however, upon taking Payday 3, I did look into Payday 2 a fair bit, and let me tell you, the mods created for Payday 2 I can 100%. I understand why Payday 2 has so many more players. I'm not even going to sit here and talk about the thousands of ways moderators can enhance your game.
I just want to mention one amazing category of mod-custom hype. Here's the thing: if there was mod support for Payday 3. I can tell there would be dozens of custom heists, not to mention a bunch of other great mods that would without a doubt have made Payday 3's player count dramatically higher than what it currently is.
I don't fully understand the logistics that go behind adding mod support to your game, but what I know for sure is that if mod support were enabled, the community would be working their ass off to create great mods and great maps, and that would give the Payday 3 development team a buttload of space to take their own time with updates, but instead, since mod support isn't a thing, all pressure now is on the development team as us players. I entirely rely on you rather than the workload being split across the entire community now since we're on the subject of improving our game play, I can't say.
Quality of life
The obvious is that this game is missing a dramatic amount of quality-of-life features. Again, I could go on to mention like 100 different quality-of-life features that are clearly missing from the game.
Let's talk about a few that blow my mind: How it doesn't exist, Voice chat How, why, and what voice chat This is a co-op game where we're meant to work together as a team to steal money and win. How does this game not have voice chat? How do you release a game without one of the most obvious features any co-op game should have?
But you can type well. What about the console players? Then the challenge tab Why aren't the challenges together? Why is the AK-47? Challenge on this page and the other AK-47; challenge is like several tabs later; why aren't they just together? Why isn't there a simple search bar for the challenges?
There are hundreds of challenges. Why is there not a simple, simple search bar for challenges? It doesn't make sense. I'm just going to move on to the next point because this is so mind-boggling to me. I'd rather just move on for now.
Weapon balance
While on the subject of obvious features, let's talk about the obvious weapon balancing issues. This I'm not going to be too picky about, as any shooter game upon release has to gain enough feedback from the community and data to be able to more appropriately balance out their weapons, but there are some pretty clear outliers that should have been addressed before the game was ever even released.
Once again, for the sake of saving time, let's just quickly compare two weapons. The VF 7s, or that is the scar, and the ziv Commando, also known as the Mac 10 now I get that I'm comparing an AR to an SMG, and both of these weapons are supposed to serve different purposes, but I'm speaking from an overkill, difficulty point of view.
Here, the scar at a 10 m range head shot does 182. Damage per shot on the other hand, the zip commando will do 60 damage at the same distance, meaning it'll require more than three shots to the head before it even matches the damage on the scar. Not to mention that the zip commando has no armor penetration, while the scar does, as you might say, but it's an SMG and it shoots faster, like I said.
I get that both weapons serve different purposes, but as far as payday 3. Overkill, difficulty are concerned, the only purpose a ziv Commando will serve is to tickle the enemies while those scar users actually provide anything useful to the team, and as we all know by now, shooting faster isn't even a good thing in this game.
