At this point, most gamers’ social and news feeds are probably being hit by a lot of references to Helldivers 2, the co-op multiplayer shooter from Arrowhead Studios. That isn’t by accident, as the game has seen an immense surge in popularity over the past weekend, as well as the commensurate infrastructure failings that go along with it.
This past weekend saw the game kick off a reward boosting event as recompense for rewards not paying out due to an earlier bug. This unfortunately had a knock-on effect of the game’s servers hitting their new capacity almost immediately and players effectively being locked out of starting the game due to server load, even as the studio released a stability-focused patch that went out last Saturday. According to current data, Helldivers 2 has seen its last 24-hour peak crest over 400K and blast past other games like Palworld, GTA V, and Destiny 2.
Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt admits that maybe the extra rewards were a bad idea in retrospect, but players are exacerbating the problem by not logging out whatsoever – a problem that Pilestedt says his engineers are aware of as work on an AFK kick timer is already being done.
Meanwhile the game’s official Discord promises a patch coming out today that will once more prioritize login, matchmaking, and server load, while also pointing out that “no single update will solve all the issues.” The devs have also continued to be openly communicative with players, as Pilestedt has argued against the idea that buying more servers will fix the problem, while another dev confirmed that new deployable mechs are coming once polish is complete.
Even so, frustrations with server issues are beginning to spill over as Steam reviews get salty and fans tell Pilestedt to stop tweeting, which earned a snappy response. “Yes! Good idea, I will sit behind the engineers and ask them ‘are we there yet?'” he wrote, “Or… I could let the engineers work independently, towards our common goal without me as the CEO pestering them at every moment. I wonder which one will work best?”
