Helldivers 2 CEO says Arrowhead has "taken action internally to educate our developers" after game balance debates got out of hand

After a few incendiary statements from development and community figures poured kerosene on the debates dominating the Helldivers 2 player base after its recent balance patch, Arrowhead CEO and game director Johan Pilestedt stepped in to assure players that such snippy remarks are "not a message that the studio stands behind."

Pilestedt responded to a few specific statements over on the Helldivers subreddit. In particular, players shared a comment from one of the moderators of the game's official Discord, which reads: "Man watching you all cry amuses me so much." 

In another, more controversial Reddit comment, one Arrowhead developer wrote: "I'm feeding the rage a little for my own entertainment here, just so you know. We haven't nerfed anything into the ground, I just think it's a little too early to pretend like the game is figured out. 

"We made two of the most brainless playstyles less viable, and brought the guns that are under/overperforming more into line with the rest," the dev added. "The game is only a couple of weeks old, so before we start making sweeping changes we want everything roughly where we intended from the start. That doesn't mean we won't bring things up when we know more about how people play the game." 

As you can well imagine, the already disgruntled Helldivers 2 community, still struggling to figure out how to deal with 11 Chargers and four Bile Titans at once when it was hard enough pre-nerf, didn't take kindly to all this. Neither did Pilestedt, it seems.  

In a Reddit reply, Pilestedt called the Discord comment "inexcusable behavior," and said "we are providing education on how not [to] behave this way when representing the studio." 

The developer comment, which has come up in several top-voted Reddit posts, prompted a more in-depth response. "We are aware of this and have taken action internally to educate our developers on how to represent the organization," Pilestedt said. 

"This is not a message that the studio stands behind. We are