In an in-game message to players today, Arrowhead Games revealed that cheaters have short-circuited Helldivers 2’s latest Major Order. The studio has distributed the intended reward to all players who didn’t cheat, and in typical Helldivers fashion, couched the whole thing in Super Earth-appropriate terms in fiction.
“The Super-Earth High Command discovered a large quantity of fake samples during the delivery of the last major order,” the message reads. “As usual, all Helldivers who performed their duties honorably were awarded medals, and the kennels of those who submitted false samples were summarily executed.”
“Laboratories throughout super-Earth space are attempting to filter out the false samples, but the expected scientific advances to combat the spread of the Gloom have slowed significantly. Because of this, worlds near the Gloom have begun relocation protocols.”
The major order to Collect millions of samples of Terminid The affair was supposed to take four days to complete, with some players complaining about the difficulty of the task. However, after two-thirds of the objectives were completed in a matter of hours, it was clear that something was wrong. It’s unclear how exactly this was achieved, but despite boasting about anti-cheat software, co-op game Helldivers 2 is home to plenty of hackers, some of whom even sell their services to dig up unreleased vehicles, enable god mode, or simply skip the grind for other players. Unique5673 on the Helldivers subreddit points to known “sample duplication cheats” as a possible culprit.
While Helldivers 2’s anti-cheat was unable to prevent this situation, Arrowhead can presumably manually examine the Major Order results and identify players who have clearly cheated. As for the game’s ongoing story, it looks like while players will receive the Major Order reward, it looks like things will continue as if the Major Order had failed.
This disruption is in line with the rather unruly behavior we’ve observed from Helldivers 2 players over the past few weeks: some have even deliberately ignored a previous Major Order to protest the nerfing of a flamethrower, and the subreddit is full of complaints (and some admiring messages) about so-called “chaosdivers.” However valid their complaints may be, I appreciate how Arrowhead has moved things forward without losing sight of Helldivers 2’s reactive, emergent narrative. Now, a moment of silence for all the fishes who suffered from this waste of money.
