A Helldivers 2 Player Is Dropping APCs Into Random Games

thegamer.com:

Helldivers 2 players are still fighting the good fight against Joel, the ever-present games master who is almost single-handedly directing the entire Galactic War. If the Automatons take over a planet, or the Terminids put up a strong fights against Super Earth forces, chances are there will be a group of players angrily shaking their fists at Joel for his tomfoolery.

However, it's possible that Joel may not be all that bad, as a viral video has been circulating of a player joining a random Helldivers 2 match, dropping an unannounced and currently unrevealed APC vehicle into the fray, and then leaving again. In the game's chat system, the player in question has the tag [AH] Joel, implying that it's none other than Arrowhead's own game master dropping new toys into a game for players to test out.

Unfortunately, we have absolutely no way to verify if this is actually Joel or not, as it's very possible a modder or a dataminer that has had access to APCs for a while has just figured out how to add them and is masquerading as Joel for their own nefarious reasons. We've known that APCs are coming for a while, ever since a gameplay video leaked earlier this month, so there's no way to tell if this is Joel or just an overenthusiastic fan.

Gameplay footage of mechs also circulated online prior to their release earlier this month, so there really is no telling what's real and what isn't anymore.

Of course, there's every possibility that it is Joel too. Arrowhead has been messing with the Helldivers 2 community for a while now, sneakily adding strange blue lasers and new flying Terminids without mentioning their additions in the patch notes, only to deny it on social media days later. In fact, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt's silence on the matter probably does mean it's more likely a modder than the studio itself being cheeky.

Whether this is a modder's doing or Joel himself, at the very least it's footage of a new type of APC that's going to be added in the near future. This