Because stealth is garbage.

I mean, seriously. The best stealth games in the world; Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell, Hitman, Assassin's Creed (maybe), Dishonored, Thief... what do all these games have in common? Well, not counting special difficulty modes, in every single one of these games if you get caught you can either kill all witnesses and return to stealth, run away and hide again, or restart at a checkpoint. You're also free to complete these games any way you want, you can kill every single enemy you find, you can choose to only take out the mandatory targets, or even decide to play without killing anyone and are often rewarded handsomely for doing so. In PAYDAY 2's stealth, you don't have any of these options. You don't get to choose how to play. Every stealth heist is done one way and that's it. You are only allowed to kill three enemies per heist and you get no reward for doing or not doing so. If you kill a fourth enemy, fuck you, you lose. If you kill an enemy and don't sit on it's corpse and play with their pager for a couple seconds, fuck you, you lose. If you get detected a single time, fuck you, you lose. There's no running away and hiding again. There's no sneaking around enemies consistently; enemy locations and movement patterns are almost completely random and extremely unpredictable. There's no fighting through it and returning to stealth, once a heist is loud, it's loud until you restart. There's no checkpoints, even if you're one step away from the van in Shadow Raid carrying the last bag you need, fuck you, you lose.

The best part is how the community treats Silent Assassin as a "cheat" when in reality it just turns PAYDAY 2's stealth from "garbage" to "playable". "BUT IT MAKES IT EASIER!1!!! IT'S A CHEAT!!!11" Have you ever considered that the reason why PAYDAY 2's stealth is so hard is because it's retardedly designed? I mean, the pager system is a downright terrible, horrible game mechanic. You only get to kill three people (in a game about killing people) and when you kill people, you have to run over to their body and interact with it for several seconds. Why? So RNG can send a guard into the room while you're answering the pager and ruin the entire heist for you. While almost every single other stealth game allows you to carry or drag bodies away, in PAYDAY you're required to use a body bag which is a consumable item. Why do I need a bag to drag a guard out of sight? It doesn't even make sense from a realism standpoint.

If you shoot a man in the back of the head and he doesn't scream, why would I need to answer a pager? A pager isn't on 24/7, you'd need to hit the button. It's extremely unlikely that a body falling to the ground would coincidentally land on the button for their pager, and even then, THE VOICE TALKING OVER THE PAGER IS DIFFERENT. DON'T YOU THINK THAT'S SUSPICIOUS? It's not realistic. It's not fun. It's stupid.

I mean, almost every game I've ever played with a forced stealth segment where you're not allowed to get caught or attack anyone is almost unanimously hated. Yet PAYDAY 2 is somehow different?