I found Fake Joel, the viral Helldivers 2 hacker who rains unreleased vehicles from the sky and says players pay him to skip the grind

GamesThird Person ShooterHelldivers 2I found Fake Joel, the viral Helldivers 2 hacker who rains unreleased vehicles from the sky and says players pay him to skip the grindWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

helldivers 2

I wanted to know for sure what was going on, so I tracked down a few Steam users who’d recently used the same username and committed a PC gaming faux pas: sending friend requests to complete strangers. Surprisingly, a few of them friended me back, and one of them had an interesting story to tell.

The part of the viral clip that didn’t make the cut, he said, was his friend coming clean to the unsuspecting player about not being the real Joel before advertising their services.

“We weren’t expecting it to be clipped and definitely wouldn’t have expected the popularity of it even if it had been.”

Powering their cheats is a trainer that Steve tells me their outfit developed especially for Helldivers 2. He says their trainer is different from the cheats anyone can download from Nexus Mods because it “actually parses the game files to look for new stuff each time it’s activated so we’ll see as stuff is patched in.”

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Behold: A car.(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

helldivers 2

Ride along

I was personally the Joel in the clip.Fake Joel

I was personally the Joel in the clip.

Things got weirder once our hellpods hit the dirt. Steve and his friend started skating around the sandy dunes at Mach speed and flying through the air. They also wielded machine pistols that never ran out of ammo and fired 100x faster than they usually do. Immediately, the pair started calling down secret goodies. One of those secrets was theQuasar Cannon, a support weapon that, at the time, none of us knew would be released legitimately a few days later.

It was almost frightening how much control Steve had over the session. Not only was he unkillable, but he could bend the rules of the mission to his will, like calling down an extraction beacon wherever we were standing. Our ride along came to an abrupt end when my game crashed while driving a buggy, a bug I’d previously been warned about.

It was an awkward end to my first vehicular excursion in Helldivers, and the experience made me wonder: What’s the appeal of cheating your way through a PvE game?

At one point, Steve started flying so high he could touch our ships in orbit.(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

helldivers 2

Why boost?

Boosting, or hiring players to “boost” you through a progression system through skill or cheats, hasrecently taken root in Helldivers 2. I’ve always associated the practice with PvP games like Rainbow Six Siege, where it’s possible to hire cheaters to illicitly boost your ranking, but it’s prominent in PvE games too, especially ones with lots of grinding. Through the use of cheats that grant them unlimited ammo, extra health, max damage, and super speed, Steve and his cohorts group up with customers and run level 9 difficulty missions, gobbling up as many samples as Helldivers will allow in a single go. When all goes well, one mission takes less than two minutes.

Seeing Helldivers 2 through the lens of an all-powerful god was enlightening, but also pretty dull.

It’s not about farming Super Credits, Helldivers 2’s premium currency, either. Arrowhead is relatively generous about giving out free Super Credits on missions, but the number of credits Steve can gather in an hour, I’m told, doesn’t make up for the price of hiring him. For his customers, the decision to boost comes down to time.

“Most people who want boosting are people that just don’t get a lot of play time and are really just wanting to play the game socially with friends,” he said. “We’ve had a cool mix of people come through, this game has an amazing community.”

In that context, boosting makes a little more sense. I’ve made the time to play Helldivers 2 a lot over the last few months, so unlocking the latest and greatest gear hasn’t been a problem. When mechs released, I had already reached the required level 25 and pocketed 20,000 Reqs. My friends who have tighter windows to play still haven’t gotten there. I wonder if they’d ever consider boosting over the finish line for the price of lunch.

(Image credit: Arrowhead Game Studios)

helldivers 2

Boosting in a PvE game may be a mostly victimless crime, but it’s against Helldivers 2’s terms of service nonetheless. Steve doesn’t seem too concerned about getting banned, but he does keep his main Steam account on a separate machine just in case. “I personally have almost 130 hours legitimately played and I absolutely love the game,” he said.

Seeing Helldivers 2 through the lens of an all-powerful god was enlightening, but also pretty dull. We had all these new toys to play with, but no stakes to make any of it matter.

That’s the sort of magic you can’t replicate with cheat software.

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Ride along#

Why boost?#

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Ride along

Why boost?