- Pharmaskittle
- Dec 17, 2007
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arf arf put the money in the fuckin bag
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The Payday Drill Debacle
There's enough moving parts to this story that I know I'm misremembering and forgetting some things, but this is my best attempt, making a number of simplifications to keep this readable. I'm going to start with some scene-setting, then go over the event and how it went down publicly. I'll follow up by explaining what I've been able to piece together about what was happening behind the scenes at Overkill.
Early warning signs
Several factors were publicly influencing community expectations going into this event.
1. Launch promises. During the 2012-2013 launch period of Payday 2, microtransactions, even without pay-to-win connotations, had a really terrible reputation. This reputation was mostly built on PvP games, but it was still in effect for PvE. Almir Listo responded to a microtransactions question by saying "We've made it clear that Payday 2 will have no microtransactions whatsoever (shame on you if you thought otherwise!)". During the same period, the initial game director, David Goldfarb, responded to a similar "will there be microtransactions" question with "No. No. God, I hope not. Never. No."
2. The Secret. The end of Payday the Heist and the launch of Payday 2 heavily involved elements of The Secret ARG. This was a core plot element that drove a lot of user interest, and users were salivating for it.
3. The hype train. An event from early 2015 tied to the release of the Hoxton Revenge map encouraged players to earn pooled "hype fuel" by, essentially, giving Overkill money. This unlocked "free" shared community unlocks, which would otherwise be sold to players. The community awards included "Paydaycon", an event in LA, and the "car shop heist," a noticeably badly made heist that introduced driveable vehicles. Bear this in mind.
One method of purchasing hype fuel was by buying the limited edition "Completely Overkill Pack". Overkill artificially induced scarcity for this pack by only allowing 50,000 people to buy it. It included four masks and a surprise cosmetic item. Again, the developers promised this was cosmetic only. This event, which was basically an Overkill fundraiser, hit a sour note with a number of people in the community, in part because it was basically pre-funding promised ongoing content development, or "unlocking" stuff that was already intended for release. This was worsened because...
4. The Payday community is toxic. Not as toxic as some of the worst out there, but still, really, really bad. This is in part directly attributable to a practice by the devs of using community influencers who were hardcore challenge run players, the sort who would stream themselves trying to survive for an hour ingame without leaving a dumpster, and, more importantly, treated their abilities ingame as some sort of badge of honor. Almost all of these users maintain their audience by continuously seeking harder challenges, and by instigating conflict with the development team. Coupled with a number of poor balance decisions, by Crimefest 2015 a part of the playerbase were already primed to take any change to the game in the worst possible way.
The Road to Crimefest
First there was a trailer. Check that swelling operatic score.
Crimefest 2015 was pre-announced as the biggest one yet, with statements showing that the gang were going to discover secrets of the ARG that had been teasing the community for years, exploring an ancient vault. As a runup to the event, the playerbase was also encouraged to complete various ingame goals to unlock free rewards that would be provided during the event. Exactly what was being unlocked was not clear: as goals came with silhouettes that, when unlocked, displayed cryptic clues about the ultimate reward.
A number of things already started to go off the rails:
Obviously false representations
Overkill made statements as if things the community did not unlock would either never be developed and implemented in the game, or that they would become paid DLC. The latter was at least plausible, but alienating; the former was obviously false, as the short timeline to the event made it clear all of the things being teased were already made. This was also true of the Hype Train event, and it bred a general sense among the more skeptical parts of the playerbase that overkill were misreporting telemetry in order to show people were hitting the required targets (there was no sign this actually happened, fwiw).
Idiot sexism
As a part of this process, new heister Clover played a prominent role, seeming to replace Wolf as a member of the main four crewmembers fort the event. Gamergate behing alive and well in the playerbase, this drew attention from the sort of assholes who profit off of eliciting rage about the presence of women in games. This was a pretty minor factor in what followed, but it was present and worth noting.
Terrible event design
The initial set of community objectives included a combination of very aggressively paced ingame actions, unlocked sequentially (e.g. "kill a million enemies with this bad melee weapon, then ziptie 300,000 civilians, then...". These were doable (and of course Overkill wanted the community to finish all of them), but they required a lot of effectively grinding the game. Also included were engagement objectives like following individual character voice actors on social media. These objectives (which apparently weren't discussed with the actors first) resulted in unwanted harassment and were replaced partway through the event.
So after all of this, we had a community that's extremely hyped and invested (including with time and money), expecting a massive, ten-day event focused on a plot reveal involving an ancient crpyt and providing ten days of free content...but with a sizeable contingent of users who were ready to get angry at Overkill no matter how good the event was.
Crimefest 2015 Day 1
Click here for the Black Market Safes announcement site.
Click here for the main trailer announcing the safes.
The event starts, and the community is given a trailer announcing that the contents of the Ancient Secret Vault are...Crates and Keys! Players will get "safes" from different collections at the end of heists, and can spend Actual Dollars on "drills" to open them. These safes contain weapon skins of randomized type and quality (with anything other than mint condition looking terrible). Additionally, some of the skins include stat boosts making the weapons very slightly better than other weapons. All of this, weapons, safes, and skins, will be tradeable on the Steam Marketplace. Like similar drop systems for counterstrike, the best-looking "legendary" skins are incredibly rare, skins that don't spawn with ugly wear and tear are rare, and the versions with stat boosts are even rarer, creating a lottery effect. Also in line with counterstrike, the update teases having members of the community design skins for future "collections".
Users who had purchased the Completely Overkill Pack learn that they, and only they, will each receive a single Completely Overkill Safe and Drill, getting a single free gun skin from a collection that would never be available to other players, except by sale. Skins from this safe were all at least "rare" rarity, but were not otherwise subject to statistical controls. Most of them also looked like poo poo (literally, in the case of the "brown river" skin). Most players who had spent additional money on this exclusive pack wound up getting poor condition skins for weapons they did not use. The rarity system was such that no one received one of the "legendary" skins. That skin simply does not exist other than in the inventory of some of the developers.
As you can imagine, this did not go over well. Further rubbing the community's faces in this matter was a launch trailer that was borderline incoherent: Chains enters the ancient vault (which is for some reason a high tech vault bearing branding from a modern security firm) and meets Vlad, who is so off-model that he's depicted in shadow the entire time. The trailer then immediately transitions to a completely zero-context flashback, shot with actual human actors, of Vlad accosting Chains while disguised as a homeless person for some reason, talking euphemistically about working with Valve to implement the safes system.
The other "reward" that the community "unlocked" on this day is a weapon rebalance that the devs had already been promising for a long time.
I don't really have words to describe how terrible the initial reaction to this is. Even the relatively sane users were incandescent. Reddit in particular was flooded with rage and memes about overkill "rewarding" the community with a pay-to-win microtransaction system, and, of course, the original quotes from the developers about "no microtransactions, shame on you for thinking otherwise" are on everyone's lips. It's worth noting that in 95% of cases, the stat boosts provided by weapon skins were miniscule and worthless- but the exceptions were significant, and were assigned outsized value. This was made worse because the game's top difficulty is poorly balanced and these stat boosts were seen as a (paid) way for people to succeed on that difficulty.
And all of this was day one of the event.
Crimefest 2015 Day 2
Five additional "unlocks" were provided this day, consisting of five separate individual masks vaguely relating to Vlad. By this point players figured out how to use cached versions of the game from steam to set up a parallel version of the game pre-crimefest and set up their own subreddit, one of several communities entirely defined by hating Overkill.
Crimefest 2015 Day 3
With a bizarre trailer consisting of a slow panning shot of a single room, Overkill announced the "Aftershock" heist, in which the gang goes to LA during a massive earthquake and steals...the incredibly unpopular microtransaction safes. For Vlad. Yes, the players are literally made to carry microtransaction crates on their backs while Vlad talks about how heavy they are. No, you don't get to keep them. No, you don't get drills for playing. Yes, there is a literal achievement for taking a homeless person hostage that makes fun of counterstrike knife skins. No, this "community unlock" does not help smooth things over. By this point antisemitic memes about "Oyveyshill" started to spread.
Attentive modders notice there are signs the environment used for the heist was originally designed for some other multi-day planned heist. Meanwhile, the general community is, well, more and worse.
Crimefest 2015 Day 4
The community learned that the day's grand "unlocks" are the ability for AI players to trade hostages, and a server filter function that had been requested for years. Hey, by the way, did I mention that each day of the event comes with a forced, large filesize update to the game that takes forever to unpack? Yeah, that's happening too alongside all the rest of the anger.
Crimefest 2015 Day 5
The community received a Light Machine Gun and, for all LMGs, a bipod attachment that lets players go stationary for major stability and accuracy benefits. While buggy, this was a welcome and unexpected addition that would have gone over very well in any other event. As it stands, it made very little difference. By this point the community was largely a roiling turd bowl, with toxic users who think that overkill is deliberately fleecing players shouting down differently toxic players who think the devs can do no wrong.
Crimefest 2015 Day 6
Overkill announces a surprise! The Dallas Pack, coming with a free community heist not tied to any of the previously "unlocked" events! Using a weird cartoon Dallas as the logo, the "Dallas Pack" is a remade version of First World Bank from Payday: The Heist. Unlike its forebear, the heist was doable in stealth or loud. Also unlike its forbear, the heist crashed frequently for no clear reason, necessitating several additional hotfix updates through the rest of the event.
More importantly, Overkill had another announcement: Wolf Cards! Wolf will now occasionally drop a drill, for free, at the end of a heist, meaning that payments are not necessary to unlock skins!
...Remember how I said things were bad at this point? It's day 6. The community has been allowed to believe this was a pay-to-play microtransaction environment for five days, and for that period, it was - people undoubtedly spent money on drills that they didn't have to. The community reacted by developing a conspiracy theory: that the drills are something invented by Overkill to save face after the disastrous microtransaction rollout. Users pointed to the short, strangely animated trailer for the update as a sign that it was quickly made, and even the broader press covered the event as if it was a "reaction" (I am confident this wasn't the case for reasons I'll get into later on). At the same time, it satisfied no one- people who were angry for clicks still had an incentive to get angry, the drill drops were opaque (and, from the perspective of users, rare compared with safe drops), and of course there was still an advantage for people who could pay. There were still safes and crates. Nothing really improved, no one changed their mind.
Crimefest 2015 Day 7
The "unlocked" events were a collaboration with Le Castlevania, the musician behind some well-known soundtrack pieces from John Wick, and a "preferred character" function for players entering lobbies. These are, again, welcome updates that made no sense as gated community unlocks, and did nothing to address the white-hot rage of the userbase. By this point players have noticed that Ulf Andersson, the brother of CEO Bo Andersson and major programmer on the games, left Overkill earlier in the year. His departure is attributed to the safes and weapon skins debacle (and iirc he did indicate this was part of why he and another founding dev, Simon Viklund, left the company).
Crimefest 2015 Day 8
Overkill announced a rebalance to SWAT turret enemies and four weirdly, loosely hollywood-themed masks "unlocked" by the community. The turret changes are probably objectively good, but the now dominant angry parts of the community are not exactly in a receptive mood at this point. Also they introduce new crashes and require another hotfix update. Overkill also announces a limited time 30 day special "event safe" in First World Bank that will unlock a special one-chance safe and skin collection in that heist. Like the Completely Overkill Pack, the plan is to let players have only one shot at the collection, inducing scarcity. It will shock you to learn that this also doesn't go over well.
Crimefest 2015 Day 9
Surprise, it's another oddly buggy Payday the Heist remake! Slaughterhouse is added to the game and while it's not got as many crash issues as First World Bank, it's still got severe issues. Additional Groucho Marx glasses and a pair referencing Vlad's homeless person disguise are added as "community unlocks".
Crimefest 2015 Day 10
The grand finale of Crimefest 2015, now a total omnishambles...is third person jumping animations. This also closes out the event with another event safe in Slaughterhouse and four masks referencing internet memes.
Overkill would eventually make safes open without drills, and would let the community get additional drops from event safes, tanking the market and removing most of its appeal for the sort of people who gamble with ingame purchases (or use them to launder money). The studio would mostly back away from extended multiday events, and would proceed to continue to eat crow for other poor decisions relating to this time period for years to come. I'll get into how Overkill was nowhere near as bad as people thought, and in other ways, much worse, in my next post.
Behind the scenes at Overkill
A lot of the below information is inferred from data leaks or statements from former devteam members. I think most of it is true, but some specific details may be incorrect.
The Original Plan
Payday 2 was designed as a Games As A Service (GaaS) product, meaning that it was intended to run for as long as possible, making money by providing expansions and additional content. To accommodate this process, the overarching plot and progression of the game needed to be set up in advance to be flexible, and this was the case. Based on leftover code from early launch versions, launch era plot material and other sources, the original idea behind the plot of Payday 2 was that eventually, the gang's safehouse would be attacked and burned down and Bain would be kidnapped or killed by Murkywater. The gang would lick their wounds outside DC and ultimately return to perform the White House heist with the help of Vlad, who was keyed into the whole Secret thing. In this telling, the Elephant played the same role ultimately played by the Dentist, who did not originally exist.
As time went on and the game succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, the plot expanded like an accordion and new characters and game elements were added to fill this space with content and, well, profitability for Overkill. Many of these deals came from tie-ins, cameos, new characters and crossover events agreed to by CEO Bo Andersson. In practice, it seems as if Bo accepted virtually any offer that crossed his desk. To be clear, many of these agreements turned out very well- for example, the Hotline Miami 2 DLC apparently was an indefinite license and involved no payments to Devolver Digital, meaning from OVK's perspective it was a free, massively popular crossover event that greatly boosted sales for both parties with no pushback. Other deals were less clearly related or successful, and engendered massive controversy within the studio because they made actual development hard to predict. Crimefest 2015 appears to have been a casualty of this process.
The Hollywood Event
Heading into late 2014, it appears that Overkill were planning to make Crimefest be the planned end of act 1 and a turning point for the game - the Gang would leave DC (possibly with or without Bain) and go to LA, where Vlad was likely to play a much larger role in future activities. The event was not going to be themed around an ancient vault, but was instead based on Hollywood, with a large number of film tie-ins planned over the following years, maximizing GaaS opportunities for promotions and benefits. Even before Crimefest was being teased, the schedule and plan for associated tie-ins were in a constant state of flux, producing acrimony within the studio. Numerous projects associated with this "LA turn" were subject to large amounts of development time before being scrapped or massively delayed by years; it appears likely that by this point, Bo had already negotiated and begun internal development of the Scarface Mansion and Reservoir Dogs heists, for instance. The Payday the Heist remake heists were going to be film-themed (as the original game had been, to a degree), and part of this movieland promotional activity was an animated film by Harry Partridge that was ultimately delayed by production issues for several years (this was the source of the cartoon Dallas used atop the Dallas Pack). The "Dallas Pack" was labeled as such because it was once intended as separate, standalone DLC.
References in Overkill sites indicated that a "hollywood" heist was planned, possibly for the event or as standalone DLC involving an assault on a producer's mansion and film memorabilia. This got so far into development that an associated set of masks were created (used for the crimefest 2015 event) along with a set of never-released melee weapons, including a filmreel, film scissors, Oscar, and director's folding chair. By what little info I've been able to pull out, it was rumored that the hollywood heist was cut was because it was disastrously unfun to play, involving some sort of forced stealth process involving robbing a location at the same time as another group of criminals and dealing with issues they created. Particularly mourned by modders and filedivers was "xeno", an accurate and player-useable pulse rifle (as in from Aliens) that was fully modeled and never implemented ingame.
A disastrous reordering
Crimefest 2015 was always going to be rocky- with the above cuts and shifts, there was never enough material to go into the event, and presenting it as a series of "community unlocks" tied to the ARG was always going to go poorly. Overkill appear likely to have done everything possible to reuse and fill those gaps with content that had already been produced, and rushed to fill in the gaps with what they could. Live action footage of Chains talking with Vlad, remade heists, LA-themed material and part of a heist were all crammed together to fit the new "ancient temple" setting, but its ultimate reception was made much worse by reversing the planned order of release, seemingly days before the event started.
The live action trailer, the Aftershock heist, even the last-minute animated trailers, all made more sense if they were all teasing the big reveal of what was actually in the safes that you were moving for Vlad. It appears all but certain that the entire microtransaction update- crates, keys, and free keys- was going to be the final day of the ten day event. All of these parts were going to be revealed at once, after the community received nine days of free, much-demanded game improvements. Vlad's slimy microtransactions deal was going to be presented on the last day, with the immediate revelation that "don't worry, gently caress Vlad, Wolf is going to make sure you get skins for free."
Instead, for some reason, Overkill decided to announce the microtransactions without a free version on day one of the event and delay the announcement of the free key dynamic for an additional five days. The effect was to make a maximally predatory version of the microtransaction system the headline of the grand community event, and made the free skins seem like a face-saving afterthought. In this way, Overkill took a losing hand and made it much, much, much worse for themselves.
Long term pain
The initial change in plans that pushed back or removed so much planned content, and forcing a months-long crunch to make up for it, appears to have been at least as much reason for an exodus of former Overkill leadership in early 2015 as the use of microtransactions. At a minimum, the crates and keys system was already planned and under implementation by the Hype Train event. This sudden scrambling of the planned order of release, however, put Overkill team members under an incredible burden to produce a Crimefest worth of material, with a different theme, and different content, in an impossibly short amount of time. That exodus, coupled with other business decisions unrelated to Payday which may have also caused the exodus, caused the near-dissolution of the studio. That mess, which is imo even worse than all this microtransactions stuff, is better left to another post.
interesting
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¿
Sep 23, 2023 16:09
