Arrowhead Game Studios is cracking down on Helldivers 2 players who use cheats to get rich quick and farm Super Credits illegitimately, but the developer's announcement doesn't have everyone on their side of the galactic war table.
"You've told us that cheaters and exploiters ruin the experience that it feels unfair when someone games the Super Credit system while you're out there earning yours the hard way," the developer writes in a recent transmission posted to the game's Discord channel.
"We heard you, and we're starting to implement changes that will tackle issues like this... Today we're improving our monitoring methods for suspicious Super Credit activity." Now, should a grunt extract with a "substantially higher" number of Super Credits than the highest-earning players ever recorded, Arrowhead has better tools to detect and stop them in their tracks.
"This will not affect legitimate players, only the bad apples cheating the system," the dev assures. "If you're playing the game grinding maps, clearing POIs, looting bunkers you will never experience any change... The steps exist to catch bad actors, not to slow you down."
"Cheaters. Botters. People using automation and duplication exploits to hoover up Super Credits at rates no human Helldiver could ever reach legitimately," are being targeted by the studio's improved detection tools, however. Arrowhead says its new system will "stop them at the source, before they can do damage to the economy you play in."
"This is a win for the community. A healthier economy means the Super Credits you earn through honest service to Super Earth stay worth earning," the message ends off. "You told us the fight wasn't fair. Today marks a big step towards eradicating pesky cheaters."
While Arrowhead isn't wrong for implementing measures against cheaters, some players in the community have taken issue with the company framing its announcement as a "win" for anyone other than Arrowhead, Sony, and both companies' wallets. You see, Helldivers 2 doesn't have a player-affected economy. It's not an MMO. It's not even a competitive shooter, and Super Credits are only used to buy in-game packs that don't expire.
"Nothing but corpo words lmao, it's the economy that they created," one players writes online. "They prefer focusing on banning cheaters instead of giving actual decent ways to get SC."
Another puts it eloquently: "Preventing SC cheating was inevitable, but this really could have and should have been done better. By buffing SC gains on higher difficulties, for example- or literally anything instead of pretending like this is some huge community-driven update when it’s literally the definition of a money driven decision."
Again, it's Arrowhead's right to protect its business interests, of course, but penalizing cheaters without addressing why people use Super Credit exploits in the first place (grinding for Super Credits is torture) has rubbed some folks the wrong way.
