Liberty Day 2025 closed with every Helldiver getting a cape, after Arrowhead Game Studios discovered millions of extra kills that the event’s counting system had not accounted for. The seasonal objective was simple on paper – hit a community total of 40 million kills with the R-2124 Constitution. The gun has two damage types, bullets and a bayonet melee, but the in-game telemetry only reports one or the other, not both combined. A developer on the official Discord said the team used bullet kills for the official tally, which left a sizable slice of melee kills effectively ignored.
Rather than force a retroactive recount and risk a long, messy explanation, Arrowhead opted to hand the commemorative Liberty Day cape to all players. That moves the community past the nitpick and keeps the moment celebratory. It is also the kind of goodwill gesture the studio has used before when community milestones and quirks collide – for another recent example see our piece on Arrowhead crowning thousands of players for Avengement Day.
Why the mismatch happened
The Constitution’s dual-damage system is handy in combat but less so in event metrics. Telemetry that reports either melee or bullets, but not both, will undercount total kills when players mix bayonet and gunfire. With events that aggregate millions of actions, a modest reporting gap can quickly balloon into a headline-sized discrepancy. Bottom line, the fix here was pragmatic – give the reward and move on. Players who notice oddities in tallies get the cape anyway, and Arrowhead avoids a contentious retroactive audit. For context on the studio’s wider workload and why simple fixes can still take time, we previously covered how Helldivers 2 performance fixes will take months.
There is a short video brief on the situation and community reaction.
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