Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios has issued an apology to players for login and progression issues that have blighted the game’s launch.
Helldivers 2 launched on PlayStation 5 and PC last week and soon saw a concurrent peak in the hundreds of thousands, blowing past Arrowhead’s expectations for the Sony Interactive Entertainment-published co-op shooter.
But as the player count hit greater heights, so did the servers struggle, with login problems compounded by progression failing to track. For a game that lacks offline play and in which progression is tied to your ability to succeed on the battlefield, Helldivers 2 endured a tough weekend.
Now, Arrowhead boss Johan Pilestedt has issued a statement explaining what went wrong. The long and short of it is that as Arrowhead worked to increase Helldivers 2’s rate limiter for its servers, the number of players logging on surpassed the limit. Even when the total capacity was increased from 250,000 to 360,000 total, the player count jumped to 360,000 after just five and a half minutes, Pilestedt said.
Pilestedt issued an apology, and said Arrowhead was working as hard as it could to sort the server problems out. Here’s his statement in full, posted to the Helldivers 2 Discord:
Hey Everyone,
Thank you for your patience during the server maintenance. With it we deployed three “rapid-fixes” aimed at improving the situation with rewards often not being handed out properly, login-issues, and server capacity.
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 1⁄2 minutes.
As such, the issue with login remains. If for any reason you get the “Failed to connect to server”issue it means that the maximum number of login requests for that particular minute is exceeded and/or that the servers are full and will require someone to log out before allowing new players in. As mentioned above, the increased capacity should require less retries to get in.
As for the reward issue, 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 is due to the high traffic on the servers leading to rewards not being tracked correctly by our servers.
I know the progression issue is frustrating, especially for newer divers that want to unlock sweet gear. 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. 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.
Regards,
Johan
Despite the server issues, Helldivers 2 is going down well with players. After an initial ‘mixed’ user review rating on Steam, Helldivers 2 is now up to ‘mostly positive’. IGN’s Helldivers 2 Review in Progress was equally enthusiastic. Check out IGN’s Helldivers 2 tips and tricks for getting started if you’re jumping in.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
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