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Helldivers 2 players have managed to kill two billion Terminids so quickly that people are, er, actually trying to do maths

Hang on, let me get my bug-squishing abacus out and ring the guy who used to give me detention.

A helldiver in front of a dead Terminid in Helldivers 2.
Image credit: VG247/Arrowhead

Good news, people who aren't fans of creepy-crawlies. Helldivers 2's latest Major Order tasked players with casually wiping out two billion Terminids, and in less than 24 hours, intergalctic pest control has prevailed. It's done so in such concerningly rapid fashion, in fact, that some people have actually felt the need to do maths.

Equipped with armour sets that definitely should have the intended passives now and crews that can pack boxes faster than anyone ever has before, the forces of Super Earth have seemigly taken bug killing to new levels. Almost bizzarely high levels.

As Arrowhead's now confirmed via a tweet, which is a slightly more subdued follow-up to several posts and reddit threads which can't quite seem to agree on whether this took around 12 hours or something closer to 14, the bugs are now ticked off as being dead. So, that's two billion bugs "dead in less than a day", since the Major Order only arrived yesterday afternoon, in what Arrowhead's calling an "inspiring display of pre-emptive self-defence".

It's certainly pretty impressive, and a testament to just how hard folks are willing to work to be let back at the automatons, like an angry drunk who's developed a particular fascination with ruining the day of one specific person across the bar. Though, the speed of it has left a few players a bit miffed. So miffed, in fact, that they've been openly talking about maths.

"The current [Major Order] is triple counting kills" one, Reddit user The_Mandorawrian suggested in a post, providing some numbers to try and back up that claim. "At 1pm EST, the total [of] Terminid kills [was] at 18,681,000,000 while the [Major Order] was at a total of 811,000,000," they asserted, "30 minutes later, our Total Terminid kills were 18,707,000,000, with the MO counter now at 884,251,385. A difference of nearly 50,000,000 [in] 30 minutes. I checked a few times during that 30 minute period and the ratio of increase averaged out almost exactly 3:1."

"Similar to personal order kill counts, it is counting the kills of [the] entire team for everyone on the team," another number-cruncher in the thread asserted. "For example, if you have a 4 [man] squad totaling 1000 kills, it adds 1000 for every player, resulting in a 4000 [kill] increase in the MO counter."

The Current MO is triple counting kills.
by u/The_Mandorawrian in Helldivers

So, maybe the forces of Super Earth aren't quite as lethal as they might seem based on how quickly those bugs bit the dust, if it turns out these battlefield boffins are actually onto something.

Regardless of how you feel about maths, don't get to stressed about any bug fixes you might think Helldivers 2 currently needs, as Arrowhead's aiming to deliver both those and new content in slightly more effective fashion going forwards.

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