apparently

Helldivers 2 has been hit with a fresh burst of negative reviews on Steam over the past couple of days, and it looks like the reason for this uptick is rooted in an alleged Galactic War messaging mix-up involving Chinese players keen to defeat the Illuminate.

The good news is that the squids may soon suffer that exact fate, with the battle for Super Earth now in the final stage of its final stage. Though, it has taken Super Earth’s president getting killed in action to get us to that point.

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Taking a look at Steam, HD2 has clocked up just under 3500 negative reviews across May 29 and May 30 so far, as opposed to 1514 positive ones. It’s a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the mass of over 220,000 negative reviews that came with last May’s PSN account linking controversy, but still noticeable.

A glance through these recent thumbs downs reveals that a good portion of them are rooted in unhappiness about recent bugs like the stratagem input one. Though, there are also a bunch that cite the percentage “99.9783%” and express frustration at Arrowhead over a recent development in the the Galactic War.

What’s happened looks to be this: with only two mega cities left to defend from the Illuminate invasion – Equality-On-Sea (located in China on Helldivers 2’s in-game map) and Prosperity City (Super Earth’s capital, placed in Sweden, home of developer Arrowhead) – there was a big effort put in by players, especially those in China, to hold on to the former.

Image credit: VG247

Their efforts meant the Helldivers’ hold on the city got to 99.9783%, but because the Illuminate are still invading en-masse in a manner the divers couldn’t put a full stop to at that point because the current order was still ongoing, there was nothing they could do to make Equality-On-Sea 100% theirs.

According to an alleged “level 150 Chinese Helldiver veteran” with the Reddit username Valkyrie_Yukikaze (thanks, GamesRadar), this lead to frustration among Chinese players, which they claim to have not been helped by the game’s Chinese translation apparently explaining defense percentages in a way that “makes it [seem] like that the city can be completely taken back from the invasion”.

Cue anger, coupled with conspiracy theories about Arrowhead and its game master J.O.E.L railroading players into specific outcomes or plot twists in the war, rather than rewarding them for their efforts and reacting dynamically to them. How you feel about that comes down to what you think the job of a D&D-style dungeon master is, but there are plenty of examples of Arrowhead embracing stuff players have done out of the blue in the past – hello mines people decided to save children over.

Anyway, here’s hoping everyone can chill out and come together for the climax of this pivotal major order. While Super Earth’s president has been killed in action overnight, Arrowhead’s latest news briefing says that the squids are “taking heavy losses” that could soon result in them being “forced to abandon the assault” of Super Earth. That’s assuming the divers can keep on holding out, so here’s hoping they stay strong.

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Byond is an old, free game engine that’s been around since at least the early 2000s in games like Space Station 13, to cite one we’ve talked about recently. It’s also been the subject of a sustained DDoS attack, according to a MassivelyOP report, that’s now into at least it’s third week.

And why, exactly, would someone launch a DDoS attack against an obscure game engine, and keep it up for this long? According to a now-deleted Reddit post, available via the Wayback Machine, a group calling itself “the international free and open-source software community” is doing it to pressure Byond creator LummoxJR into making the software open source.

“Attacks on Byond servers are a symptom of your obstinance,” the extremely talking-like-Sephiroth message states. “They will persist as long as you ignore the voices of those who keep your platform afloat. We demand you voluntarily side with progress.

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“Choose: Let Byond die as a proprietary relic, or let it rise as a free project. Time is running out.”

Whether or not that’s a legitimate claim, I cannot say. It certainly doesn’t sound like a good reason to throw up a sustained DDoS attack, but I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that ‘this sounds too stupid to be true’ is at best 50/50 when it comes to predicting whether something actually is true.

In a Reddit thread that went up not long after the attack began, appropriately entitled “What kind of maniac DDoSes Byond?” users suggested other possible rationales for the attack, most of them variants on “some guy got mad on the internet.” LummoxJr implied in the thread that they’re not sure about the real reason for the DDoS, but wrote that they’d “heard a rumor as to how this started, and it doesn’t really involve Byond; it was just a grudge between someone and a server that escalated.”

Whatever initially touched it out, the fires are still burning: The Byond website remains inaccessible, and as of the latest update to the DDoS Downtime Megathread, mitigation efforts are ongoing but there’s no ETA for a full restoration. In a separate thread posted May 23, LummoxJR said they’re “still dealing with the thing,” but also took a kind of bright-side view of the ongoing mess.

“I know the current situation has pushed a lot of us into closer contact than normal, and in many ways that’s a good thing,” they wrote. “But there have been some folks coming into new spaces hot, especially thinking they have a new idea that actually isn’t new. I know it comes from a good place. Let’s just all remember to show each other a little extra leeway and respect.”

And in good news for people who actually use Byond, it’s not out of reach: The website is down but some parts of it, including bug reports and downloads, are now being hosted on Discord.

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With the Illuminate now on the verge of defeat, Helldivers 2 was just hit with a fresh barrage of Steam review bombing apparently rooted in a Galactic War comms mix-up

Byond game engine suffers a weeks-long DDoS attack, apparently because a wanna-be Bond villain is trying to force it to go open source: ‘Attacks on Byond servers are a symptom of your obstinance’