Helldivers 2 Server Issues Aggravated By Reward Boosting Event And AFK Players

Popularity is a double-edged sword in the MMO world, especially when an unexpected horde of players suddenly comes knocking on your door. In the case of Helldivers 2, its congestion issues were further compounded when it kicked off a reward boosting event last weekend as compensation for an earlier reward bug.

The FOMO-inducing event saw even more players dive into the recently launched co-op shooter which almost immediately reached its newly raised server capacity. This effectively locked players out due to overwhelming server loads and prevented them from even starting up the game. Meanwhile, players continue to flock to the game, bringing its all-time peak concurrency up to 457,649 players on Tuesday night.

Arrowhead Studio CEO Johan Pilestedt admits that the boosting event may have been a bad idea in hindsight, but that the problem was further exacerbated by players not wanting to log out for fear of not being able to log back in. He says that they’re now working to address the issue with an AFK timer that will automatically kick players out of the game after a certain period of inactivity.

The team also rolled out a patch earlier this week to help alleviate the ongoing login, matchmaking, and server capacity issues but were quick to note that “no single update will solve all the issues.” Pilestedt also argued against suggestions to buy additional servers to fix the congestion issues as negative reviews on Steam begin to pile up.

Pilestedt responded to particularly salty reviews that he stop tweeting and focus on the ongoing issues instead, saying: “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?”

Probably not the best approach, but he’s not wrong.