Uninstalled the game yesterday, it was fun for a while but there's just nothing new to keep it entertaining. I know that heists take a while but at that point it really seems like OK is going the easy way with all these weapons DLCs instead of adding other content. Besides I really don't like how they keep saying that weapons DLCs don't interfere at all with new heists since they're seperate teams. I can only suppose since I don't know the structure of the studio but I doubt that they have a "small weapon DLC" team and "other stuff" team, I mean game designers in charge of balance and testers must be the same between both teams. On top of that this DLC also added ziplines which add events and locations on maps so levels designers probably worked on it too.
Election Day was nice, especially since I think it is the only heist in the game that is balanced for the new stealth system (open spaces, multiple entry points), but even then Payday 2 is a pretty lackluster stealth game. There's nothing you can do regarding guards, I don't know how to put it in words but PD2's stealth is essentialy just a cat and mouse game. Guard patrols are random and unpredictable and you don't have any move set that allows you to dodge them. In a stealth game like Splinter Cell for example you can hang from ceilings or hide in furniture, use distractions or make some noise. In PD2 you can just run around while dodging guards that you can't influence in any way beside killing them.
For example, Election Day day 2. You hack voting machines and if a guard comes around and sees the machine being hacked, he calls the police. What I find frustating is that when you start hacking the machine you can't do anything, what happens next isn't in your hands anymore. If a guard decides to come check the box, the only solution you have is to kill him. Of course that sounds fair, just don't start hacking when there's guards around, however, you don't know when guards are going to be in 10 seconds. Their patrols aren't ... logical. If a guard leaves a room that he has been for 10 minutes, it's possible that he'll hang around in the middle of the next room for 3 seconds and then comes back to the same spot he was in earlier. I understand that having random guard patrols in the only way of keeping the game fresh no matter how much you play it but there's no point if the patrols doesn't make sense and you can't predict them a bit. A solution would be start hacking when guards are far enough from the crate so that they can't reach it in a reasonable amount of time but that hardly ever happens, there's too many of them. There was some moments where I really believed that Payday 2 was as much a stealth game as Pacman.
Also, I think this is the game that handles grinding in the worst way I've ever seen. Overkill keeps removing ways to get fast experience by tweaking heists or adding positive/negative boosts but at the same time there's only 3 heists that nets you reasonable amounts of XP past level 50-60 and that horrible horrible Crime.net system keeps proposing low pay, low xp heists in normal no matter your level. It'd be less of a pain in the ass if they tiered difficulty levels so that for example past level 70 you only get very hard/overkill/death wish heists. I mean obviously if you're level 70 and you want to play normal/hard you can just buy heists, they cost next to nothing on these difficulty levels.
I'll just come back when there's a new heist, with Killing Floor 2 being announced I think I'll be fine with coop games for a while.
Its barely playable on PS3. Its constantly freezing. Is there any fixes on the way?
Last update was 6 months ago or something on consoles, the next update will be when they release all the PC content to catch up and there's no date for now (something to do with Sony or MS or just Overkill who doesn't want to bother with consoles anymore, it's a mess). Take that as you will, if I were you I wouldn't expect anything soon and move on to another game while they sort this out.
EDIT : Last update was the 10/28/2013