Well, let's go over what Overkill is a garbage ass company. Strap in because this shit list is huge.
Starting in 2015
At one point, Overkill added stat boosting microtransactions in the form of weapon skins after promising they would never add MT at all and insisting players should feel shameful if they thought otherwise.
Soon after that they
added stat boosting weapons skins now there are skins that boost experience and money earned that stack for every other player who has the same type of skin.
Team Boost is our new feature that has a chance to apply to a weapon skin with an experience and money bonus. The Team Boost benefits the whole crew when completing a heist and it stacks if other players also has a skin with Team Boost.
They also as part of the game's Spring Break Event in 2015 a limited time paid DLC pack called the Completely Overkill Pack was sold for $19.99 USD and included four masks and the promise of exclusive,
secret content to be released later on that would be cosmetic only.
Q: In the Completely OVERKILL Pack, a secret item is offered. Does this item somehow increase those players advantage of the game or are they simply cosmetic items?
A: The secret item is cosmetic. It will not make you better than anyone else. This pack is for anyone who wants a way to support OVERKILL in developing the free Hype Train content for the community. Based on this, it’s up to you whether or not you want to purchase the pack. For those who support us, we’re happy to give them four cosmetic items along with an additional secret item to be revealed at a later date.
The content was released and it featured weapon skins with the experience boosts and seven packs of DLC if the player doesn't own them already. If they already have the DLC, they receive nothing in its place. There were 50,000 Completely Overkill Packs offered and were sold out.
The Completely OVERKILL Safe and the Completely OVERKILL Drill are the awaited secrets from the Completely OVERKILL Pack which was released during the Hypetrain event. The Completely OVERKILL Safe will come bundled with a Completely OVERKILL Safe Drill, that opens the safe.
The Completely OVERKILL Safe is a special safe and we will give one to each player that has bought the Completely OVERKILL Pack, regardless of activity, which means you can log into the game at any time to receive it.
A total of 50,000 of these safes will be given out to reflect the 50,000 copies of the Completely OVERKILL Pack that were sold. The Completely OVERKILL Safe contains an exclusive collection of 25 weapon skins. The Completely OVERKILL Pack-owners are guaranteed a rare, epic or legendary weapon skin upon opening, which can be used, traded or sold.
Owners of the Completely OVERKILL Pack today also receive 7 DLC for free. These are automatically added to your library. Included: Butcher's Western Pack, Gage Assault Pack, Gage Sniper Pack, Gage Historical Pack, Armoured Transport, Overkill Pack, BBQ Pack.
Overkill were doing such a shit fucking job at being decent that some of their
steam moderators literally refused to do work.
After this shitstorm they
issued this response
Today's AMA isn't going well
There's a shitstorm going on at the Payday Reddit today, and for good reason -- the devs have recently implemented microtransactions after they promised they wouldn't. This particular category five is based on an AMA held by Overkill producer Almir Listo, which fans are going crazy over.
For starters, Listo deflects every well-intentioned question regarding the implementation of microtransactions, and attempts to directly PR-speak the community, which is a bizarre tactic. He also outright blames the media for misrepresenting the topic in some sort of desperate straw-man maneuver, when it's clear to practically everyone that this was implemented in one of the poorest ways possible (basically in the dead of night under the guise of an event called the "Black Market Update").
Despite the blowback though, the microtransactions are here to say. Listo confirms this in the AMA, noting, "We understand that there is a lot of fury, anger and disappointment with us adding this. From an economical standpoint however, completely based on statistics, we can already see that the Black Market update is working as we intended."
The thing is, Overkill will probably stand to make a lot of money on this system, preying on whales and casual players, leaving their dedicated fanbase in the dust. While I don't have an inherent issue with microtransactions in games where they're easily ignored, the fact that they already promised that they wouldn't implement them, and proceeded to ignore their dedicated community with tone deaf, canned responses is troubling.
The real question is -- will it be worth it in the longterm if they don't budge on this.
Which is basically summed up as "Fuck you we got money"
Oh,
here's even more shit they've done which i'll pick out for you
Threatening To Delete Vital Updates
Overkill specifically say on the Crimefest site that anything not reached will be deleted. That meant deleting these turret changes which people have been asking for since the thing released. "Got bored of grinding the challenge? Alrighty, keep your turret then". The same could be said about the weapon balance. Yes, it has some issues but overall we needed one. Would that have just been scrapped if we didn't make it?
Update: During my interview with Almir, he said they never would have deleted anything and just released it later. That means either the entire RTC was pointless, or that was just a quick attempt at covering "Wait, we said we would delete stuff which turned out to be critical"
Events Centered Around MT's/Skins
This shouldn't be a thing. We have a 30 day timer to find a hidden safe and crack it for bonus loot. It is not a good idea to make the only immediate incentive behind an event something that is already a hurricane of controversy. "These people seem to be angry about this. Let's make them work to get more of it!". That's not how you deal with controversy. You do not have people that are angry with something jump through hoops to get a differently colored version of that something.
John Wick as the Crimefest secret reward
This one was a burn that left a bad taste in the mouth of the community. An ad for another character that many people still do not like was used as the final reward for a long campaign in the Payday community. The entire point of Crimefest was to give players content for free that would have been paid had the Crimefest goals not been met. Wick was the final goal, an admittedly hard one to reach. What if we didn't unlock him? Would we have been expected to pay the $4.99 price tag character packs use for a walking advertisement?
Completely Overkill Pack
Another one people avoid talking about like the plague. This one is simply a mess. First of all, before release it was mentioned that no DLC would be over ten dollars. Here we have (or rather had) a limited-time DLC for double that price. It was called support for Overkill, but them providing something in return at the same time of the transaction means it is downloadable paid content, regardless of how you view it. People saw it as Overkill asking for donations and they had the following to say:
There is not a single word anywhere regarding donations. As always with our community, we ask for your support.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how asking for support via a monetary transfer is different from a donation in any way except name. On top of the four masks included for this, there is another cosmetic item still unreleased. It was announced that this would be a random cosemetic item from a pool of 25 different ones. This one angered several people, myself included. This meant the community essentially paid $19.99 for the default masks with added lights and an RNG roll. When people began talking of refunds, this pack was released days ahead of the explained date which made refunds near impossible. That seems very fishy in my eyes. People have since begun refunding their copies of the Completely Overkill Pack if they still own them, and Steam has reportedly oblidged based on the fact that part of it is still unreleased and a secret. At this point, I'm almost embarrassed to admit I still own my COP. I'm clinging on to hope that if the community makes enough noise, Overkill will move remove the RNG and give all the owners all of the items. I know that seems farfetched and is WILDLY unlikely, but with a price tag that was at the time two thirds of the game itself for only cosmetic items, it seems fair to request alot of the items or at the very least the choice of which item from the pool we get.
Update after it released:
COP is skins with stat buffs (making their cosmetic only line a complete lie). 1 of 25, some worse quality than the free safes from Slaughterhouse and FWB. To make it worse, their "apology" to COP owners for the wait was to give 7 DLC (one of those was the Ovk Pack which they specifically said is not included). What do you do if you own these 7 DLC already? Well ♥♥♥♥ you, here's a skin. That's right, people that bought DLC get LESS from the COP than people who bought only that
Another thing that bothers me is how the DLC was handled, and I'll touch on that. Remember the statements that said the Overkill Pack was not part of the Completely Overkill Pack? When the COP released, it actually DID have the Overkill Pack. Along with 7 other DLC. This was a problem because the vets who bought all the new DLC as they came out ended up spending more money to get the same amount of content as people that just bought the COP and called it a day.
Update 2:
If you refund the back you lose any of the 7 DLC tied to it that you bought previously. You don't get your money back for those either. I have a theory that this is to prevent refund attempts on the off-chance it works. Why would you refund something you don't like if doing so takes a pile of stuff you DO like?
It took them over
3 years to deliver a
feature that was advertised at launch.
Even more false advertising
Exclusive Content
It was promised before release that players would all have a fair and equal shot at all content. Now, that isn't the case for the following:
E3 2015 masks (require you be in attendance or happen to see an Overkill member's twitter)
Humble Bundle 1/2/3/4 masks (require you purchase them during a limited time frame)
Alienware Alpha masks (require you own an entirely different gaming device)
Several masks and weapons from Hotline Miami update (require you own Hotline Miami)
Jacket Character Pack (require you own the special edition of Hotline Miami 2)
Paydaycon 2015 Mask (Same as E3)
Kawaii Dozer Mask (Require real life bobblehead purchase)
Dead by Daylight
Two of those are unavailable for all future players. Four of those require money on a product outside of Payday 2 which people might not want, but are forced to miss out on content for not supported something entirely else.
Misinformation
Overkill has a slight reputation for not always being correct in their announcements, intentionally or not. This reflects poorly for obvious reasons. Here are some examples:
The most recent update (at the time of thread creation) mentions fixes to bugs which clearly are still in the game.
When asked why police do not have hitboxes in their arms or legs, an Overkill staff member said the engine would be unable to handle it. Later in the thread, somebody posted a video of them modding those hitboxes in flawlessly in a single afternoon
Flashbangs only appearing with police to throw them
See safehouse customization
This statement: "People sometimes forget that we're a relatively small, independent developer studio. We're roughly 45 developers at OVERKILL and Starbreeze combined."Notice how they call themselves an independent developer. This statement is entirely false although they continue to hide behind it. An independent developer is one that publishes their own games. Overkill have never done this. SOE published Payday: The Heist while 505 published Payday 2.
Them being children
The Walking Dead
This was handled almost comically poorly and left a black spot on Overkill's record. They posted a one-day timer that revealed a one-week timer that revealed a one-month timer. No joke. What so many people hate about this one is Overkill used Payday's resources to build hype for something entirely different. During the month, daily audio tapes released and many referanced the events of Payday 2, furthering the implication of it being Payday-related. The biggest slap in the face when it turned out to be something else was that the wait finally ended....on the one-year anniversary of Payday 2's launch. It didn't help that when people accussed Overkill of a bait-and-switch, or even said they just didn't like it, the response was "Grow Up. It's our forum, we do what we want" on Twitter. That site is where some Overkill staff have had some outbursts or just been outright mean to fans, such as this:
https://twitter.com/PergerBoy/status/508312647914500097/. Also, this gem
:
Consoles were fucked then and still fucked now lol
Consoles
Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game has been abandoned. The additional releases on Xbox One and Play Station 4 are now over 400 days without update, despite constant claims of it coming soon. As somebody who originally played on console, I feel for console players. Developers shouldn't play favorites in such a way.
Now we hope the present where
Digital Foundry says that the switch version has no dynamic resolution and runs at 1600x900. This contradicts
Almir himself saying that switch version features up to a 1080p resolution in TV mode. There's also reports coming out of it being quite
buggy. This is on top of the fact that the switch version is several months behind on content with it missing key features like voice chat.
Oh, did I mention the enormous amount of gouging with DLC? They released about 3 dozen DLC addons throughout the life of the game. All but a few not costing money. The DLC featured some of the best gear in the game, meaning higher difficulties were much much harder without them. Not only did some of the DLC feel necessary to have, but it was also priced absurdly high for the content offered. The majority of the DLC was $3 for weapon packs which featured a handful of weapons (i'm talking like 3). Characters were $5 and all maps were $7. The maps cost $7 EACH and sometimes were very short and small. There was DLC several times A MONTH most months, with the free content being next to nothing outside of the crimewave events. And even with the addition on microtransactions, they still fucking released about a dozen pieces of DLC which cost money.
Oh hey, they also recently increased the price of the game in a sneaky (not so) ass way. You are now forced to buy the ultimate edition with all the dlc. You can no longer purchase just the base edition of the game. So the game went from costing $20 to $45. For extra fuckery, you can no longer buy individual DLC packs. You know what that means? If you only bought some of the DLC before this, you are now forced to pay for the entire ultimate edition to get the rest! Wow, what a company lmfao
http://store.steampowered.com/app/218620/PAYDAY_2/
But yea, this tweet totallyyyyyyyy mis-represents them as a company ;)
TLDR which covers some of the old fuckery:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1lQ9g518cg
