Helldivers 2 players defended a Halo Reach-esque planet so hard that Arrowhead has declared a new "Avengement Day" annual holiday to honor the brave Beach warriors

Helldivers 2 grunts have been channelling their inner Master Chief and exercising their very democratic right to ignore High Command over the last few weeks, and it was all in an effort to liberate a planet with vague similarities to Halo Reach's titular world (they both have planets called New Alexandria and are/were alien-infested, for example.) But their valiant, maybe illegal defiance has now been rewarded by an official holiday.

"The planet Seyshel Beach was liberated earlier this week following a long and concerted campaign by a small but inexplicably dedicated group of Helldivers," the game's social media account tweeted. "To annotate this long-awaited victory over the Illuminate, the citizens of the planet voted to establish the date of the planet's liberation as "Avengement Day.""

How does Super Earth decide to celebrate holidays while embroiled in a three-way galactic war? Well, "Beach citizens will pause to remember the planets lost to humanity's foes, and relish the superlative satisfaction of long-awaited retribution." How exciting.

Stop me if you've heard this one before, though. A planet that a subset of divers are absolutely obsessed with taking, on the other side of the galaxy to High Command's ongoing Major Order, that's full of seemingly insurmountable odds.

It's Malevelon Creek all over again, which was undoubtably the game's most infamous moment of player-driven mass role-playing, as thousands of divers almost derailed other Major Orders to capture an unrelated planet. Herd mentality and in-game propaganda strikes again.

High Command even acknowledged that New Alexandria has no strategic importance to the war against the Illuminate, who were a nice stand-in for the Covenant if you squinted hard enough.

The official Halo Twitter account even chimed in on the fun with a Halo Reach-inspired "Remember Beach" image.

Repeating it "a bajillion times," Helldivers 2 studio CEO insists Gameguard anticheat isn't behind the game's performance issues: "We see no evidence of it"