Reddit v. Arrowhead

 

In a previous blog post I spoke about how a Reddit user and Helldiver had made a request of Arrowhead about the balancing issues that they are saying are plaguing the game. The user had issued a challenge to Arrowhead Dev's to play the game on the hardest difficulty, on an Automaton Planet, and with certain weapons and stratagems. Of course officially the Dev's had not posted a response but unofficially there were speculations that they may accept the challenge as it would net $1K in funds towards a charity of their choice.

However, as of today, things got explosive...Hellbomb explosive. Arrowhead Game Studio's posted an official statement, not through one of the Dev's accounts and they did not post it in the 'in game' role play that they normally do. This was directly from Arrowhead and it was straight to the point.

Arrowhead made it clear that toxic behavior will not be tolerated...and I agree with this 100%. From what I was able to gather through the Discord there was an incident in which Reddit users had started doxing members of the Dev team and the user that issued the challenge. While the exact wording of what was said between the parties wasn't discussed it was assumed that Reddit users had started the Doxing attacks due to Arrowhead not yet accepting the Challenge. I believe there is also more to this, but I was not able to get a great deal of information due to my limited time and the fast pace nature of the Discord server.

The majority of posters were calling out the Reddit Doxers and even referred to Reddit Users who exclusively use it as a social site as 'low class' and people that 'cant be trusted on real social sites'. I do not share these same views but I also do not use Reddit that much if at all so I'd be the worst one to comment on that part.

Regardless, there is supposedly now a campaign going that is asking everyone to once again rage hate and vote down HD2 on Steam and other platforms. I have checked Steam and there have been several to post that they are thumb downing the game and not supporting it for various reasons all that lead back to the doxing and the handling of the doxing by Sony and Arrowhead. That said, I will still be playing the game and supporting it. I think that we are seeing what happens when you allow gamers in a community to throw their weight around and not realizing that they are hurting the game as a whole and the gaming community as a whole and how their actions harm the idea of what "Gamers" are.

In times like these we should not be shouting at one another or doxing one another or doing anything of the sorts, we should work together to figure out who is at fault, and then remove those people from the community, not turning on one another. But in modern gaming...it seems that we turn on one another sadly more so than removing the problem.