Some Helldivers 2 players are inexplicably killing each other for resources, despite a dozen different UI elements telling you they're shared

A proud citizen of Super Earth looking mightily confused, from Helldivers 2. — (Image credit: Arrowhead Games)

Helldivers 2 is a co-op game, and its mechanics are designed around that. All the samples, super credits, and medals you pick up get shared among your teammates at the end of a mission. Yet for some inexplicable reason, some players say randoms are gunning them down to swipe their goods—or yelling at them for impossible resource hogging.

I've never experienced this phenomenon myself, mind—but it's hard to ignore three consecutive Reddit threads with a combined 17,500 upvotes screaming to the bloody contrary. Granted, this is a game with a concurrent player peak in the hundreds of thousands, but I'm surprised anyone's missing the memo, here.

In the aptly-named user ComplainOnInternet's thread "I've never seen streamers do so much damage to a playerbase", one commenter writes: "Just got [teamkilled] and kicked from a group for 'stealing samples'," while a fellow soldier commiserates: "I picked up a rare sample and a dude IMMEDIATELY shot me with a grenade launcher and grabbed it … I dropped back down like 20 feet away and killed him right back. Bro we can do this all day or we can kill bugs, stop wasting my time."

Another, more shoutily-titled thread laments players killing "other people for the thing they already have". Despite common sense, it's flooded with similar stories of baffling encounters. "The amount of times I've had to argue with people telling them we share everything only for them to kill me or rage quit is just sad," writes one player. Here's a player who got kicked for picking up super samples—here's another that was told by grumpy teammates that no, they wouldn't go pick up 'their' samples.

To really drive it home how weirdly (note: it's weird that this is happening at all) common this self-destructive behaviour is, one player was even bothered enough to create this genuinely neat Cold War-era style propaganda poster in the name of spreading awareness.

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So, yes—to reiterate: resources are shared. There's no reason to gun someone down and swipe their stuff unless you're a jerk. As a matter of fact, purposefully capping your teammates reduces your amount of reinforcements: It's the closest Helldivers 2 gets to letting you shoot yourself in the foot.

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.