// PC GAMER — GAMING
After cracking down on 'cheat' mods in Helldivers 2 and taking another Steam review beating, Arrowhead plans hotfix that should allow harmless cosmetics
The move to a better anti-cheat has not been wholly embraced by players.
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Helldivers 2, in the running for the most review-bombed game in history, got another Steam beating a few weeks back when Arrowhead announced a change in anti-cheat services that would break or disallow existing mods.
The goal with the switch from GameGuard to Easy Anti-Cheat, as the studio explained at the time, was to combat mods that "create unfair advantages or negatively impact others," but it also acknowledged that mods it has no problems with, like cosmetic add-ons, would also be affected. The news went over like a lead balloon, prompting over 10,000 fresh negative Steam reviews and a "mostly negative" recent rating.
Skimming the last few weeks of ratings, negative reviewers are either miffed about their broken mods, new and old bugs, or the perception that Arrowhead is attacking modders instead of fixing bugs. There was no reality where a community notorious for intensely boycotting everything it finds annoying was going to embrace stricter modding oversight, but Arrowhead did address the outcry in its latest Helldivers 2 developer blog.
"We added Easy Anti-Cheat for one reason: to reduce the number of cheaters joining your missions and ruining the experience. On that front, we think we’re taking steps in the right direction," the blog read. "However, we do see that this change means that some PC players lost the use of fan-made game mods. While all mods are not officially supported, we have been reviewing how the code changes disabled cosmetic non-gameplay mods. This has resulted in adjustments that should allow some cosmetic mods to be functional with our next hotfix."
Mod restriction is a prickly topic for Helldivers 2, which is both a perfectly valid candidate for mods as a purely PvE game, but also a live service with real-money currency and DLC. A common form of cheating in Helldivers 2 is to use mods to farm (or straight up spawn) premium Super Credits that are supposed to be rare. Another is to alter weapon or enemy behavior in ways that are unfair to vanilla teammates trying to play normally, or in some cases cause client crashes.
I'm guessing Arrowhead is slightly more concerned about the folks farming free currency at rapid speeds than the ones with infinite ammo cheats, but it won't be budging on outlawing gameplay-altering mods that, "from a technical perspective, are indistinguishable from an attempt to cheat."
But that's not the only thing the Reddit crowd is pissed about: The studio also acknowledged that promised improvements to hellpod steering and stratagem bouncing have taken longer than planned because they "require substantial adjustments to both mechanics while taking into account all edge cases," copped to missing patch dates on its current roadmap, and apologized for overselling the arrival of bug caves on more map types as a "new biome" on the same roadmap.
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