Good news, angry players, Helldivers 2's farmers don't look to actually be actively aiding enemies of the war effort
They're not having a positive effect on the war effort either, but things aren't as bad as you might believe.
Ok, it looks like someone from Arrowhead has finally stepped up to give the Helldivers 2 community an unequivocal answer as to whether people abandoning operations because they’re only interested in farming is actually resulting in losses for Super Earth, hopefully helping end an era of confusion and heresay.
If you’re out of the loop, now that the game’s servers are faring pretty well, a large sect of the game’s community looks to have turned its attention to the issue of some players farming certain missions over and over again in order to reap certain rewards. As we covered yesterday, there’s a lot of confusion around whether this approach could be actively hindering the efforts of other players to take over planets and accomplish the game’s main goals.
As a follow up to a bunch of posts basically trying to beg and/or threaten people into not just grinding kill missions in order to earn the likes of XP and requisition forms, the latest post to rocket to the top of the game’s subreddit features a comment from a developer on the game’s subreddit regarding what abandoning operations actually does. “Yes, quitting after only half the [operation] counts as a loss for Super Earth,” reads this reply from Arrowhead developer Evil-Bosse.
Given that it was posted in response to someone asking how failing or abandoning an operation affects the meters attached to planetary goals, that seems pretty cut and dried right? Here’s the thing - it looks like it's not correct.
Earlier today, a member of Arrowhead’s community and support team - going by the username Misty - responded to another comment about the farming issue in the game's official Discord server. “I just got confirmation that abandoning an operation does not progress the enemy's percentage,” they said, “so people who leave operations do not negatively affect a planet. But they do not positively affect it either.”
Given that they’ve responded to a request for proof by saying: “[the] proof is me, coming internally from Slack,” and the fact that Evil-Bosse’s now posted in response to someone citing their original comment: “I might have been wrong about that”, I’m definitely inclined to believe Misty. That said, just to be thorough, we at VG247 have reached out to Arrowhead ourselves to try and double check.
The bigger issue here seems to be that, if the way the game communicates things like the consequences of abandoning or failing operations was a little more in-your-face, we might be able to avoid things like this weirdly toxic hooha in the future. Arrowhead’s had a lot on its plate recently, but hopefully it might be able to add in some extra tutorials on certain key mechanics at some point down the line.
If you want an idea of what Helldivers 2's future might look like, make sure to check out our feature exploring whether the first game might offer some clues in that regard.