With just 25% liberation after 28 hours, Helldivers 2 players worry for the new Major Order and its all-out assault on Automatons: "There's no chance we're doing this"

Helldivers 2 players are fearing for the worst as their progress in liberating three Automaton-held planets for the latest Major Order is flatlining.

Yesterday, April 4, Arrowhead Game Master Joel initiated a new Helldivers 2 Major Order to crush the Automaton forces once and for all. Players were given precisely four days to liberate Tibit, Durgen, and Maia, three Automaton-held planets which are currently all that stands between the bot hordes and total obliteration.

Approximately 28 hours into the Major Order, things aren't looking great for Super Earth's forces. According to Helldivers.io, a tracking website which follows real-time data from Helldivers 2, Durgen is currently labelled a stalemate fight between humans and bots, with just over 14,000 players attempting to liberate the planet.

Similarly, Tibit isn't faring well, with 18,000 soldiers having raised the liberation meter to just 3.15% at the time of writing. The Helldivers 2 data tracking website estimates that it'll take roughly 10 days for Super Earth's forces to fully liberate Tibit, time which players obviously don't have.

The one bright spot might be Maia. At the time of writing, 106,000 players have managed to raise the planet's liberation meter to an impressive 70%, and the planet should be fully liberated in around 10 hours at this pace. That's if the Automatons don't regain ground while European and American players are asleep later today, however.

Some players were already predicting the worst outcome yesterday, just hours after the Major Order to liberate all Automaton planets went into effect. The subreddit post just below, for example, noted that a full 62% of active Helldivers 2 players weren't able to raise the liberation meter on Maia past 10% for some time. That's obviously increased a day later, but it's still not the progress many were hoping for.

Others theorize that Arrowhead and Game Master Joel are setting players up for deliberate failure. "This MO is very intentionally rigged against us, likely for narrative purposes. Whatever the Reclamation is, it's gonna make the bots much worse - and put them in new spaces for us to fight in. Nobody wants to go back to the Creek, right?," the player writes, referencing the dreaded planet Malevelon Creek.

Some players are worried that Helldivers 2 crashing is going to further impede progress. "Gee, I sure hope all the crashes right after extraction aren't causing the campaign to fail to recognize our efforts," writes one comment under the Reddit post above. Seasoned players point out that all precedent shows that even if the game does crash after you've extracted, your liberation progress is seemingly still counted, which should still be the case.  

Either way, things aren't looking great for the Helldivers 2 player base right now. With less than three days to go until the Major Order ends, we'll have to revisit this space on Monday, April 8 to see if things have improved. There's still a chance that players can push Maia, rally their forces, adjust course, and dogpile the other planets hard enough to pick up the slack, but it's going to be a hard battle. 

Helldivers 2 dev offers rare insight into how Major Orders and the Galactic War get written: "It's not as fun of a story if we just steamroll the Automatons and win."