Helldivers 2 players have had it with being kicked from public lobbies

Helldivers 2 is a gift that keeps on giving and players are jumping on board their super destroyers to spread managed democracy across the stars. But with popularity often comes toxicity, and many Helldivers 2 players have had enough of others kicking them from wide-open public matches.

In Helldivers 2, players can either host a match or connect to someone else doing so, with the host having all the privilege to kick others if they so deem. You can only connect to publicly open lobbies (a setting that one could switch on or off), and some players are tired of being kicked from a public match when all they wanted was to find a team to play with.

A big Reddit thread came about on Feb. 27 regarding this very issue. “Please stop kicking me,” the original post said, with hundreds of others flocking to share their experiences with kick-happy hosts.

“It does get annoying when you get kicked from like four lobbies in a row,” read the top reply. Not all hosts are as malicious, however, as another reply said they’d joined several in-progress missions and only got kicked after they were done. I personally have experienced a situation where a host kicked me after a full 40-minute mission on Helldive difficulty—as we were reaching the ship. I wasted a good hour and got nothing out of it. Truly a shame.

The best way to circumvent having to bear the emotional weight of kicking someone, if you like hosting your games, is to set it on private, as the original post asks people to do. It’s a simple switch in the game’s settings, and it’s smooth sailing from then on for you and your friends. Toxicity has also been on the rise in Helldivers 2, which, combined with some people’s ignorance of the options menu, can produce results such as we see here. Thankfully, the developers are keeping the game strictly PvE to curb the potential toxicity that any game could face these days.