“It doesn’t get much worse for a multiplayer launch”, Fraser Brown wrote on the release of Helldivers 2, mentioning issues like “broken matchmaking, frequent crashes, and a kernel-level anti-cheat system that everyone hates.” The developers at Arrowhead have been working to rectify the issues, and according to an update from CEO Johan Pilestedt, three hotfixes deployed during a recent period of server maintenance have dealt with at least some of the problems.
But not all. As Pilestedt explains, “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.” As PlayStation’s biggest PC launch, Helldivers 2 hit that limit hard, which was responsible for multiple problems. That limit has now been doubled, from 10,000 logins per minute to 20,000, and the total server capacity increased from 250,000 concurrent players to 360,000—a capacity that Pilestedt says was reached five-and-a-half minutes after the servers went back online. If you’re still having trouble connecting, that’s why, though at least “the increased capacity should require less retries to get in.”
Another big problem has been unlocks not being awarded properly at the end of a mission. “As for the reward issue,” Pilestedt writes, “the fix was mitigated but not resolved. And without additional server maintenance this will still not work as intended. If you get the issue you can try rebooting the game to increase the chances of it being reset.” This problem is apparently also caused by “high traffic on the servers leading to rewards not being tracked correctly by our servers.”
Pilestedt finishes by saying, “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. 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.” Maybe, rather than hammering the servers with even more attempts to connect, now would be a good time to chill out on Helldivers 2 for a little bit. Give it a day, and in the meantime, perhaps try out one of the many excellent demos currrently on offer.
