Helldivers 2 patch 01.000.303 fixes major crashes, Eruptor under investigation

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Helldivers 2 patch 01.000.302, developer Arrowhead Game Studios has released yet another patch today. While patch 01.000.303 might only address a few known crashes, there’s a lot of discussion around it in the community regarding the Eruptor.

Yesterday’s patch for Helldivers 2 implemented a slew of changes, including some to the R-9 Eruptor. Today’s patch 01.000.303 doesn’t change any of that and only builds upon the fixes to help more players see fewer crashes. However, all players can talk about what it did to the Eruptor after yesterday’s update, with some believing the weapon to be broken. While this isn’t entirely true, we have had confirmation from the developer that the Eruptor is under investigation.

All Helldivers 2 patch 01.000.303 stabilizes the game but players just want to know about the Eruptor

Arrowhead Game Studios released Helldivers 2 patch 01.000.303 early this morning. It’s a tiny hotfix for two common sources of crashes. These are:

• A fix for a crash related to damage over time.
• A fix for a common crash linked to hot joining a full session.
• As a result of these fixes, you can’t hot join players until they’ve dropped onto a planet or not at all if they leave from the loadout.

However, because it’s all the community seems to be able to talk about, these patch notes have had a mod note added to them on the Helldivers 2 subreddit. It adds information about the current status of the R-9 Eruptor using screenshots of developer comments from the official Discord server.

Yesterday, the Eruptor had the shrapnel it sprayed from its shots removed because it had a chance to randomly kill enemies and players. Killing other players is obviously unintentional, but the developer also doesn’t want a weapon to make light work of larger enemies. This seems to have been partly caused by the introduction or ricochet to certain weapons.

The screenshots with the patch notes show how the developer nerfed the Eruptor to align it with all the other weapons in the game. But multiple posts on the game’s subreddit show players discussing how the Eruptor has taken a much bigger hit than yesterday’s patch notes suggest.

Some players have even posted what appear to be comments from more of the development team explaining how the Eurptor currently isn’t working as intended. I believe this is likely the case, especially considering this shows from multiple sources that Arrowhead is actively investigating the weapon. It can’t return as it was, but the team agrees it can’t continue to exist in its current state for too long.

The main message regarding the Eruptor seems to be, “That’s what you get when hotfixing an urgent issue the whole community is on fire about.” The team now needs to take time to watch, test, and figure out exactly where it needs to be to meet player expectations and work as intended before we get another update. Based on what’s been said, that will come when it’s ready and won’t be rushed.