Whenever Arrowhead updates Helldivers 2, it creates division among the players. Now it seems things are getting serious as entire platforms are calling each other out. The Helldivers 2 subreddit has blamed the game’s official Discord for driving “one-sided” changes to the game, primarily regarding particular popular weapon nerfs.
This turf war between the two communities has been going on for a while, though it has been officially contextualized in a thread posted on Tuesday, which compiled screenshots of volatile discussions on Discord. The thread’s creator alleged that players disagreeing with the developers get bombarded with “clown emojies” and negative replies, whereas those praising the devs get all the support. Many in the subreddit agree with this notion, though the consensus is by no means ubiquitous.
“I get that AH has been running tiny Discord-community-style games for almost a decade, but Helldivers 2 is not the one for it and they need to realize that,” one user in the reply said. Another claimed that “people act like devs can’t be wrong,” alluding to those who are always supportive of what developers do, no questions asked. “Just because it’s their ‘vision,’ that doesn’t mean it’s a good one,” they added. Many players in the thread aimed their sights mostly at one of the developers, Alexus, who is part of the balancing team at Arrowhead, and didn’t linger too much on the whole “clash of the communities” side of things.
Contrary voices could also be found in the thread, primarily from a player saying that Reddit and Discord users give themselves too much credit and “vastly overestimate how much weight their opinions hold with the devs.”
The primary source of these recent divisions in the player base has been the incessant rebalancing effort by Arrowhead. That, combined with how some community managers acted when said updates were discussed (one CM got axed from the company), has spawned continuous arguments, civil and otherwise.
