After players reject the stratagem 3 times, Helldivers 2 devs snap and demand they kill 1.5 billion enemies or suffer the MD-17 Anti-Tank Mines as punishment

The poor, unwanted MD-17 Anti-Tank Mines stratagem has been foisted upon players yet again in Helldivers 2—these mines, which have been ready-to-go since April, have been rejected by the community three separate times. No, really:

• April: Helldivers 2 players ignore the MD-17 Anti-Tank Mines in favour of the RL-77 Airburst Rocket Launcher.
• May: Those same players are tasked with killing 2 billion Automatons to get the anti-tank mines. They fail to do so.
• June: Patriots are given a choice—get the MD-17 Anti-Tank Mines or save the sick, imaginary videogame children. They chose the children.

Essentially, avoiding these mines—which are, objectively, a new gameplay feature players are choosing not to receive—has become a running joke, and developer Arrowhead Games has quietly admitted defeat:

"High Command has ordered an Efficacy Review of the currently available Mine Stratagems," reads an in-game announcement. "To enable this review, the Helldivers are ordered to kill or dismantle the targeted number of Liberty's enemies," that is, a whopping 1.5 billion foes, and far too little time to kill them in.

The kicker? A new stratagem, which is, again, a straight upgrade for the player base at large, is being used as a failure state: "If the targeted number of enemies are eliminated, then the currently available Mine Stratagems will be deemed sufficient, and no additions will be authorised at this time."

It's not looking great for mine haters, though—at the time of writing, approximately 720 million foes have fallen to Super Earth's might, which isn't even scraping 50%. The Major Order has one day left, and it began on Friday, August 2. The galaxy's finest just aren't spreading democracy fast enough, but given how exhausted Arrowhead Games must be, watching these mines gather dust, I can't help but wonder if they've been set up to fail by the short timespan.

While divers did kill 2 billion bugs in a day back in April, that was still during a peak of the game's popularity, when Helldivers 2 was averaging around 250,000 thousand players on Steam daily. Right now the 24-hour peak is 38,654. Still very successful by live service game metrics—especially one made by a smaller studio—but operating at around a seventh of the capacity it was then.

Still, like ill-mannered schoolchildren smugly watching their teacher have a meltdown—and I mean that with the utmost respect and appreciation—the player base seems to be smugly satisfied that it took Joel saddling them with an impossible goal, not enough time to tackle it, and using the stratagem as punishment just to get it into their hands. As Reddit user AgentNewMexico puts it: "Honestly, kudos to the community for making this Arrowhead's solution to giving us the mines … Well done, everyone. Stand proud, Divers, our meme is strong."

Considering some of the beefier tank enemies that'll be featured in The Escalation of Freedom, a major content update that'll be deploying tomorrow, ol' Joel might be doing players a mercy here—though given how under-used mines are in the current meta, I wonder if this beefier version will see much play.