Helldivers 2 dev doubles the player capacity of its servers, but tells fans it's "still not enough" to meet the demand

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A lot of people want to be playing Helldivers 2 right now

Helldivers 2
(Image credit: Arrowhead)

Helldivers 2's developer has doubled its player count following server issues, but says that it's "still not enough" to meet the demand. 

Helldivers 2 may have only launched last week, but it very quickly sent its developer into "crisis mode" due to server and matchmaking issues - causing the game to be taken offline and undergo emergency server maintenance. Now, a few days later, Arrowhead Game Studios CEO Johan Pilestedt has shared an update on Twitter, revealing what's been fixed and how players can solve some issues themselves.

"Thank you for your patience during the server maintenance," the update reads. "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."

Going into more detail, Pilestedt continues: "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."

The CEO explains: "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 ½ minutes."

To give players a little more context, the developer says: "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." Thankfully, due to Helldivers 2's newly-increased capacity, it now "should require less retries to get in."

The post then touches upon the reward issue some players have also been facing, which stopped some people from receiving the items they'd earned as rewards. As the post explains: "The fix was mitigated but not resolved. And without additional server maintenance, this will still not work as intended."

Pilestedt did offer some advice for frustrated players though, saying that they 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." Finally, the update ends with an apology from the devs and the promise that "we're doing our utmost to make it right." 

In more positive news, it only took 24 hours for Helldivers 2 to overtake God of War to become the biggest PlayStation Studios game launch on Steam.

If you're looking for something new to play, take a look at our best shooter games list.  

Hope Bellingham
Hope Bellingham
News Writer

After studying Film Studies and Creative Writing at university, I was lucky enough to land a job as an intern at Player Two PR where I helped to release a number of indie titles. I then got even luckier when I became a Trainee News Writer at GamesRadar+ before being promoted to a fully-fledged News Writer after a year and a half of training.  My expertise lies in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, cozy indies, and The Last of Us, but especially in the Kingdom Hearts series. I'm also known to write about the odd Korean drama for the Entertainment team every now and then.