It's defintely not Christmas, but Christmas in Helldivers 2 has basically just been cancelled. Arrowhead's advising that you refrain from lobbing any snowballs at your mates until further notice, until it figures out how to fix your favorite pastime from inadvertently causing crashes.
That's right, you might be safe to use your arc weapons again without fearing any sudden freezes, thanks to the game's latest patch stopping that from being a thing, but now you've got to avoid trying to cover someone in a suspicious patch of yellow snow you've found mid-op and are somewhow okay with picking up. To be fair, you're now supposed to be making sure those pesky bots get driven back now anyway, so you've got plenty to keep you occupied.
Over in the official Helldivers 2 Discord server, Arrowhead community manager Baskinator announced this depressing news, declaring: "Helldivers, avoid having snowball fights". Don't worry though, this isn't some kind of punishment for failing a major order or, er, being a bit too reticent to stop killing Terminids and actually deal with the galaxy's current biggest threat. "We're aware of a crash caused by picking up and throwing snowballs," the developer explained, "We hope to have this fixed in the near future, but until then, we advise against snowball throwing". So, there you go, if you want to make sure you don't get booted out, stop trying to take people's heads off every time you drop onto a frigid planet.
