Helldivers 2, the third-person shooter that launched on PS5 and PC on February 8, is enjoying a fair bit of popularity. It rocketed to the top of Steam charts shortly after launch, and it quickly soared past God of War’s top concurrent player count to become PlayStation’s biggest PC launch. It’s so popular, in fact, that its servers are struggling to keep up.
Over the weekend, just days after its launch, Helldivers 2 players reported extensive server issues, trouble logging in and progressing their characters, and problems receiving the endgame rewards. Developer Arrowhead Game Studios pushed out several rapid fixes, which helped a bit, but problems persisted. On February 11, Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt took to X (formerly Twitter) to update frustrated Helldivers 2 players, writing:
To speak in technical terms, our services as well as our partner services have a rate limiter that denies connections beyond a volume per minute to prevent the entire system from failing. We managed to increase the rate limit from 10,000/min to 20,000/min and the total capacity of concurrent players was increased from 250,000 total to 360,000 total. This was however still not enough as the player count jumped to 360k after 5 and a half minutes.
Because of this, the “issue with the login remains,” and players can still get a “failed to connect to server” error message. The increased capacity “should require less retries to get in,” though. And the swath of rapid fixes “mitigated” the issue with receiving rewards, but did not resolve it. “Without additional server maintenance, this will still not work as intended,” Pilestedt continued. “If you get the issue you can try rebooting the game to increase the chances of it being reset.”
“For now, please once again accept our sincere apologies for the issues you’re facing and rest assured, we’re doing our utmost to make it right,” he promises. “In order to do so, right now it is crucial that our team gets some sleep and we will be back at this again in a few hours.” Here’s hoping players will have a measured response to the idea of developers getting much-needed rest, as Pilestedt’s response runs antithetical to the all-too-common culture of crunch in the industry.
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Helldivers 2 looks to be an absolute blast when it actually works. Its physics system makes for some hilarious mishaps, its cooperative gameplay and crossplay are great for lovers of online shooters, and players seem to be really enjoying shooting a fuckton of aliens on Super Earth.
Update 02/12/2024 at 2:00 p.m. EST: The previous version of this story referred to Super Earth as New Earth. My Bad.