Nightmare weekend for Helldivers 2 somehow attracts more players than ever

The smash hit title Helldivers 2 from Arrowhead Studios faced outages and achievement progression issues all weekend. The problems didn’t dissuade users from trying to get in for their chance to defend Super Earth, but it ultimately made things worse for the game’s struggling servers.

As reported by prominent community leaker Wario 64, the Helldivers discord released a statement about the impending cap to the player count on the game’s servers. Helldivers’ Admin team mentioned that they “had server-related issues with a concurrent player spike. This led to some mission payouts failing, some players being kicked to their ships, or being logged out.”

The developers of the acclaimed title had recorded a similar spanner in the works that led to sleepless nights earlier this month, with the CEO of the company Johan Pilestedt announcing via x (formerly Twitter) on February 11:

A message to the community in regards to our latest server update. @helldivers2 @ArrowheadGS #Helldivers2. pic.twitter.com/lwriSFbBbK

— Pilestedt (@Pilestedt) February 11, 2024

Pilestedt has an active social media presence and has commented publicly on the success and issues the game has faced. Sony’s biggest-ever Steam launch has been met with praise and problems in equal measure, as we reported earlier this month.

”Thank you for your patience,” He said. “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.”

Players are not disenchanted by the bugs and the issues that are hampering the gaming experience, rather the opposite is as the server traffic only seems to increase for the co-op shooter. Arrowhead goes on to say that the “team is working around the clock to solve these issues. While we’ve been able to mitigate some of the causes, we are still struggling to keep up with the scaling that is needed to accommodate all our Helldivers.”

Pilestedt himself would also respond to his burgeoning community in  tongue-in-cheek fashion on X:

Yeah, in retrospect this was maybe not the best idea