As rather hilarious self-inflicted deaths pile up, Helldivers 2's latest update comes under fire for controversial ricochet changes

Hello. Helldivers 2 gots a rather beefy new patch yesterday, and now people can't seem to stop finding ways to accidentally defeat themselves in battle. What's to blame for this sudden rise in rather hilarious mistakes? Well, a change to how bullet ricochets work seems to be drawing the majority of the ire.

Yup, while there's some of the usual unhappiness about the nerfs that came as part of the patch's array of balancing changes to weapons, which were admittedly outnumbered - or at least equaled - by the amount of buffs on offer, the big backlash this time is related to what bullets do after they leave your gun. That being, in a lot of these recent cases, casually pinging straight back into the body of the helldiver that fired them.

So, as a bit of context, one of the changes Patch 01.000.300 enacted is this: "Shots that ricochet from heavy armored enemies will now properly hit the Helldiver who fired them." The idea behind looks just to be focing folks to be a bit more disciplined with their fire, since they'll now be at risk of the consequnces.

It's this tweak that players are blaming for a sharp rise in rather hilarious, if understandably frustrating, self-shootings like the one below, and this one. Countless other folks who seemigly couldn't bring themselves to post the embarassing footage have also testified that they've been dying in a similar fashion more often than they'd ideally like to since the patch arrived.

"The ricochet is utterly broken," declares one of several recent posts on the game's subreddit about the topic. "I just spent time using both [the autocannon] and [expendable anti-tank rockets] and had them REFLECTED DIRECTLY BACK AT ME when firing from an elevated position onto an armored enemy," the player argued, "the rockets defied gravity itself and immediately blew me to pieces. Other changes are fine. Weapon balance is fine. This is a mechanic designed to artificially raise difficulty without proper counterplay, or loadout diversity. This has to be tweaked somehow. This is ridiculous."

Naturally, some would-be Super Earth detectives have already started investigating these issues, with projectiles bouncing off of shield backpacks when players have them equipped looking to be responsible for at least some of these accidental deaths. Meanwhile, one player's suggested that some instances of the issue could actually be caused by shrapnel kicked out by weapons like the Eruptor. They argue that the ricochet change may just be causing players to die from this, rather than there neccesarily having been a huge increase in the amount of ricochets that result in deaths across the board.

Odds are we'll have to wait for Arrowhead to wade in to find out any clear answers as to what's actually going on here, but hopefully it doesn't disrupt the nice Major Order roll the game's community has been on of late.