Fake News Incite a Helldivers 2 Movement For Better Communication

On the morning of June 26, you might have been sipping your coffee or tea, scrolling through Reddit, and reading up on the news about your favorite game. Then, you probably stumbled upon what seemed like an important announcement by none other than Arrowhead CCO, Pilestedt. This, now deleted post, fooled a lot of fans. Helldivers 2 players are saying that the lack of proper communication channels has led hundreds of community members to buy into fake news.

Fake News Fooled Hundreds of Helldivers

Obviously, these things happen. The only guilty party is the person who created the fake Discord post. It’s almost impossible to double-check every single piece of information that we absorb daily. This wouldn’t have been such a big deal if the players hadn’t already pointed out that Discord shouldn’t be used for announcements. The Helldivers 2 team has a history of posting important announcements in the general chat sections. The sea of unrelated comments then buries the announcement in literal seconds.

One player, inlukewarmblood, stated: “Is this proof enough that Discord isn’t a good place to do these things? Someone managed to just completely farm karma off everyone by pretending Arrowhead said something on a separate space with an unprovable source. A Reddit post. Steam community updates page. Hell, I’ll take a terminal in-game with a feed for this stuff. Anywhere but Discord would be just amazing”.

MechanicAccording836 admitted: “Wait what? It looked like… A Discord post. I was fooled I guess. You make it sound like it was obvious but, to someone who doesn’t really use Discord much but is familiar with it… That just looked like a Discord post”. And… it did. The post was so well-made that players had to double-check Discord and search for Pilestedt’s posts just to confirm it.

QueasyAd1637 explained: “Basically, Arrowhead releases formal news only from Discord official channel and Steam, discord first Steam later, but sometimes you might find many ideas of the new patch from Pilestedt Twitter”. Another player, andii74, added: “AH has abysmal community engagement honestly. Even Indie devs manage to communicate with players on Steam, Reddit, X. Some even sent emails if you subscribed to their newsletter when a major patch drops”.

Players Suggest Ways of Improving Communication

As for how to solve the fake news problem and improve communication with Helldivers 2 players, several ideas were coined. First of all, the players agreed that general chat sections should be used just for casual talk. The announcements should be posted exclusively in the announcement section if Discord were the only option.

Comprehensive_Toe113 suggested: “I understand that not everyone will go to a website but the difference between a website and Discord, Reddit, or Twitter is that the information is locked behind a subscription or it’s lost in the slew of bulls**t. A website is accessible to everyone.”

Probably everyone’s favorite idea is for the announcements to be available in-game. SirCrouton noted: “An in-game mailbox that displays stuff like Patch notes, Notices like Weapons temporarily disabled for bug fixes, news, promotions related to the game like Twitch drop news, or even use it to give players free rewards to claim. Would be cool if the Super Destroyer crew mentions it if you go talk to them”.

As of the time of writing this article, AH hasn’t given any official statement on the topic. Or they have but it was buried on Discord. We’d say the best way to go would be some sort of in-game bulletin board.

Of course, the actual conversation with players probably means a lot to the developers. Instead of just publishing announcements they get to interact with the players and get feedback live. And that’s great. But, if there were an official page on every major network that offered the same information that would be simply amazing. Hopefully, this event will trigger some changes in the Arrowhead’s approach and the players won’t have to double-check everything all the time.