Phew, Helldivers 2 just got an “emergency hotfix” to tackle a mission-ruining glitch that’s been letting people spam crash-inducing mech swarms

Right, so. Over the past day or so, a pretty serious glitch has been plaguing Helldivers 2 – it let cheeky players spawn in so many stratagems at once the game would crash. Thankfully, Arrowhead’s quickly gotten on the case and released an “emergency hotfix” to tackle it.

This issue looked to a new thing that’d only popped up – or possibly been discovered – since the game got its big Illuminate invasion update earlier this week. With a battle for Super Earth that could be its own fresh update looking on the cards for May 20, it’s no surprise Arrowhead’s quickly moved to nip this in the bud.

Arrowhead social media and communications manager Katherine ‘Baskinator’ Baskin announced the deployment of this “emergency hotfix” via Helldivers 2’s Discord server this morning UK time (it’s May 16). It comes with a solitary patch note – “fix for the Stratagem spamming bug that caused severe crashing.”

So, just what was going on? Well, as reported by PC Gamer, players had worked out a way to swpan an infinite number of stratagems at once, meaning that folks who wanted to ruin a game for a laugh could drop a crap-tonne of stuff like mechs or airstrikes from ships onto the battlefield at once – enough to cause the game to crash.

Things got so bad, clips of this stuff being done or showing off how to do it were banned from the Helldivers 2 subreddit by moderators. “Everyone and their mothers, spouses, and children have all seen and heard about the exploit,” moderator OmegaXesis wrote in a post outlining the ban, “We do not need hundreds of images and videos flooding the subreddit showing us your undemocratic explosions. It’s become a nuisance. The developers are aware of it, and it doesn’t need to be shown or explained how to reproduce it.”

They added: “Please refrain from using this glitch in public missions. Your PC might handle it fine, but there are many people whose PCs cannot handle it. It can cause them to crash and ruin their fun. Be nice.”

There had already been plenty of posts that saw players complain that folks doing stuff like this was ruining their helldiving fun, so it’s good that they should now be able to get on with battling the squids without having some dick making it rain mechs.

In other recent Helldivers 2 news, Arrowhead CEO Shams Jorjani recently took to the game’s Discord server to say some stuff about Arrowhead’s next game, which being clear that HD2 is still the main focus for a while yet.