Never separate a nerd from their big spreadsheets, or there’ll be consequences. It’s a lesson all of us need to learn sooner or later, and Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead has now had to deal with it, with what looks like a pretty benign proposed change regarding the sharing of datamined content on the nerdiest, spreadsheetiest channel of the game’s official Discord server having caused a bit of a ruckus.
With the Galactic War now resumed following its recent hiatus as Arrowhead worked to fix a bug with planet liberation rates that’d been “harming the game experience”, this is clearly something folks feel passionate about. You know, given that they’ve been arguing rather than just getting on with battling the Meridian Singularity.
So, what went down? Well, over the weekend, the Arrowhead community staff who run Helldivers 2’s official Discord server revealed plans to stop players from sharing any links to datamined content in the server’s “The-Armoury” channel – the bit specifically designed to host chatter about gear, from guns, to armours, and even capes.
The reasoning given for this proposed change was a desire to try and de-toxify the discourse around weapons a bit, as well as ensuring that potentially inaccurate stats won’t be shared, while still allowing people to talk numbers. “Honestly, we want to try and make this channel more welcoming,” Arrowhead community manager Katherine ‘Baskinator’ Baskin explained, “The constant reliance and pushing of datamined infodumps is alienating to people who just want to chat about weapons without it spiraling into an argument about datapoints.
“This rule has been in effect in every other channel in the server,” they added, “This one has gotten away with circumventing it for a long time because we have earnestly tried to support these efforts. But every time I enter this channel, I see nothing but petty arguments, and it’s time to reel it in.”
Understandably, there’s been plenty of push back from players who enjoy using data from community-created spreadsheets in their gun comparisions, with plenty pointing out that Arrowhead doesn’t share this info in-game, meaning they can’t easily switch to referencing official sources instead. “It’s fine to want those things communicated in-game,” the community manager told one player in the server who brought this point up, “I think it’s great to keep asking for that feature.”
Thankfully, it seems a bit of a compromise has been reached since all this chatter took place. One of the channel’s most prolific spreadsheet posters – a user going by the very apt handle “John Spreadsheet” – and Baskinator having confirmed that they and other community resource creators can still post links to their creations in the channel, so long as they include a clear disclaimer that what they’re sharing is “unofficial” in nature.
“We ended up in a world where the only change is that unofficial sources need to be labelled as unofficial,” John Spreadsheet posted following this conformation, “I think that works perfectly, clears up misinfo.” They added that in their view, “Skepticism with public community-made resources is how they get better”.
Do you rely on datamined info when debating which loadouts you want to rock in Helldivers 2? Let us know below!