HELLDIVERS™ 2 News

Helldivers 2 overtakes God of War and Spider-Man to become PlayStation’s biggest PC release to date

Helldivers 2 has become the biggest PlayStation game released on PC yet, at least going by the number of simultaneous players on Steam, as it doubled the previous record of concurrent players set by God of War.

The last few days have been pretty wild for Helldivers 2. The sequel took off immediately, quickly becoming Sony’s biggest launch on PC, surpassing God of War. Server issues couldn’t prevent the positive word of mouth from spreading, and the co-op shooter continued to grow in popularity.

But that has sadly exacerbated all of the connectivity, and server-related problems that those who jumped in early are very familiar with. The good news is that things have only gotten better.

Helldivers 2 is yet another example of a predominantly co-op game being a victim of its own success. Since its launch, the servers have buckled under the weight of keen conscripts ready to exterminate some bugs. There's been frequent disconnects, matchmaking issues, and post-game rewards not showing up for some folks. But Arrowhead CEO Johan Pilestedt has offered some comfort, saying that they've popped three hotfixes live to fix some of these issues.

[12 Feb 2024] Server Update

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

Helldivers 2 is getting a long-term fix to its online woes soon, but a quick patch has settled things for now

Arrowhead Game Studios released a quick patch to help with Helldiver 2's matchmaking issues yesterday, and has now said it's working on a long-term fix.

Helldivers 2 launched earlier this week, and while it's done so well as to overtake God of War as PlayStation's biggest PC launch, it's not come without some teething issues. Players were struggling with matchmaking in the few days since it launched, with some also criticising the game's PC optimisation, as well as its kernel-level anti-cheat software. Those last couple of issues are a bit harder to resolve, but over in the game's Discord, game director Mikael Eriksson has confirmed that the quick-fix patch for both PC and PS5 is now available in game, so you should be able to play it without as many problems now.

"The most important thing to highlight is that we've made additional improvements to matchmaking," explained Eriksson. "A full matchmaking solution is in the works but will take a few more days to test and deploy. Thanks for your patience as we work through the last details." There did seem to be further issues last night, but a message from chief operating office Maria Cornelius shared that "a rapid fix was prepared.