A new update for Helldivers 2 brings changes to address the recurring “grief kick” issue in the third-person shooter.
Arrowhead has just announced Helldivers 2’s massive Escalation of Freedom update, featuring new enemies, mission objectives, increased difficulty, and more, and it’s coming next month on August 6th. Alongside the update is a quality of life change specifically aimed at countering the “grief kick.”
Katherine Baskin, Arrowhead’s Social Media and Community Manager, writes about the PlayStation Blog Helldivers 2 developers know that “some players are using the team kicking system to harass others.” To counter this, Arrowhead will introduce a feature that, if a player is kicked, will allow them to spawn into a new game session as the host, with “all team loot” from the previous session they were kicked from, including samples.
“All items can now be picked up by the player before they are extracted. The squad that kicked will see a message in the chat widget that a player has been kicked, but their loot remains unchanged,” adds Baskin. “With these changes, all players have the opportunity to walk away with all the loot they picked up on missions, with no Helldiver losing out,” adds the Community and Social Media Manager.
The kicking issue first emerged shortly after Helldivers 2 launched earlier this year. If you were playing the shooter’s highest difficulty levels with a group of strangers online, it wasn’t uncommon to find yourself kicked if you weren’t using weapons and stratagems that were designated as meta, like the Breaker shotgun at the time. It’s clearly an issue that Arrowhead considers to be recurring, though most players have calmed down in the face of this harsh and arbitrary requirement.
In late May, a Helldivers 2 community manager reported that Arrowhead was working on a “fix” for players getting kicked by lobby leaders. About two months later, that fix is almost here.
As Helldivers 2’s soldiers are tasked with crushing 1 billion insects, High Command not-so-subtly hints that “Terminid aggression and expansion may increase in response.”