Payday 2 developer Overkill has apologised for "all the distress we've caused the past few weeks", referring of course to the community's frothing reaction to the addition of microtransactions to its latest game. It's been an unpleasant few weeks, with all manner of abuse being hurled at Overkill, and with volunteer Steam forum moderators going on strike.
The studio addressed the matter in a Reddit AMA a few weeks ago, explaining its decision to add microtransactions to the game after stating years ago that it wouldn't, but the anger hasn't gone away. Probably because those microtransactions are still in there, and haven't been changed in any big way.
Now, Overkill has issued a frank apology on Steam.
"The past few weeks have been some of the most challenging in the history of this community," the statement reads. "Players have been angry with us, media have written about us en masse and our volunteer moderators went on strike. For all the distress we've caused the past few weeks, I'd just like to take the time and say that we’re sorry. We've done a lot of things right in the past, but these past few weeks we screwed up.
"We need to get better at many things, and we will do our best to improve as soon as possible."
Their efforts to improve include this 2-hour discussion with three volunteer mods that went on strike:
I don't expect you to watch that, so here's a handy summation of what was discussed during the conversation:
"Today we had a meeting with Ashley and Jones, two of our volunteer moderators. Ashley and Jones has been collecting questions from the community that we discussed during the meeting. Two of the topics were stat boosts and the latest COP reward. We're currently looking into what we can do to make up for the final COP-reward. Ashley and Jones gave several suggestions from the community that we are currently discussing internally.Our main goal is to try to find a way to reduce or remove the random elements of the final reward, whatever that reward will be. Regarding stat boosts, Ashley and Jones suggested that we introduce something similar to StatTrak as part of future safes, a feature used in CS:GO in their cases. This is something we've been thinking about as well, and something that we will discuss going forward. I must stress however that we cannot currently make any promises but these are things we will be discussing as we move forward."
In addition that that meeting, Overkill has arranged to meet with many of Payday 2's top modders, and assigned 8 Overkill developers to actively engage with the community in the Steam forums, starting from next week. Many members of that community have been predictably vile in the comments underneath the statement, including several calls of "Fuck you Overkill", and at least one that asks the developers to kill themselves.
