While Helldivers 2 players looked to continue spreading democracy Wednesday night by squashing bugs and blasting robots, the very opposite was happening in the game’s Discord after it got locked down due to users spamming memes over and over again. The meme spam stemmed from a Steam outage which resulted in players saying “F” in chat so many times that the moderators cracked down on community and put an end to the spam. Things are back up and running now, but the offending memes in question have been pretty much purged from the Helldivers 2 Discord with only screenshots and anecdotes remaining.
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Around 6:40 CT on Wednesday, Helldivers 2 players in the game’s Discord had been experiencing with Steam due to an apparent outage. Players talked about whether it was a DDOS attack or the game’s servers just acting up again, but one common message from many players was the popular “F” meme from Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.
Discord user purplegion, a moderator in the Helldivers 2 server, responded to the spam with a warning.
“SPAMMING ‘F’ WILL RESULT IN AN INSTANT TIMEOUT, FOLLOWED BY A BAN IF DONE AGAIN AFTER TIMEOUT,” the moderator said.
That’s not an unreasonable message at all, but the mistake made there was that purplegion used the “everyone” tag which, in Discord, notifies everyone in the server whether they’re online or not. The Helldivers 2 Discord currently has over 126,000 members at this time, so you can imagine what the response was after telling all those people at once that they definitely shouldn’t come into the server and spam “F.”
“Server is on lock until further notice,” associate community manager Spitz said around 15 minutes or so after the spam commenced. “Since a small minority of people can’t behave like adults and have decided to mass spam every channel to the point of making them unusable, you’ve now all lost the privilege to use the server for a few hours while we clean up.”
The “clean up” can be seen by looking at the older messages in Discord where a huge gap exists between approximately 7 and 9 p.m. CT after channels were unlocked and people were able to type again. Amid exclamations of “WE’RE FREE” and people looking for groups to play, it was still a bit chaotic due to slow mode being turned off with everyone trying to type at once, but the Discord server is back up and running now.
“Server is now unlocked and slow-modes have been adjusted in all channels,” Spitz said Wednesday night. “Apologies from the entire moderator and C&S team for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience while we cleaned everything up. Please let me know if I’ve missed any settings or switches that need to be reset.
