Image: Arrowhead Game Studios
Helldivers 2 is a little too popular for its own good, but fixes are on the way.
Thanks to its successful launch and now-viral status on social media, Helldivers 2 is having some trouble dealing with its unexpectedly large player base. The game’s launch month has been chaotic, to say the least, with developer Arrowhead Game Studios constantly having to assure players stuck in login queues that server-related fixes are coming, along with a long list of bug fixes.
This week, the developer made its notoriously difficult Defend missions easier while limiting its peak concurrent players to 450,000.
Helldivers 2 pushes new update to fix bugs and tweak difficulty
Helldivers 2 developer Arrowhead Game Studios published a message on the game’s official Discord channel this week, announcing that it was capping concurrent players to around 450,000 to, "further improve server stability.” That means more players are going to be stuck in login queues for the foreseeable future, as the studio is, “still struggling to keep up with the scaling that is needed.”
Arrowhead clearly wasn’t prepared for such a successful launch, noting that, “Earlier tonight we 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.” To prevent issues like these from happening to other players, the game is limiting its concurrent players while working, “with our partners to get the ceiling raised.” The game has only gotten more popular since launch, hitting roughly 411,000 peak concurrent players on Steam just earlier today (at the time of writing).
While the studio prepares fixes for its server issues, it’s also pushing out updates to patch other problems players are experiencing in-game. Patch 01.000.009 was released yesterday with a, “focus on stability and matchmaking", to reduce crashing and tweak a particularly notorious mission type. The game’s Defend Event has become infamous for how difficult it is to complete, even if all players have to do is escort civilians to safety while fending off robots. Unfortunately, it’s really hard to keep these civilians alive even on lower difficulties given the sheer might of these robots.
This patch reduces the frequency of robot spawns to make things a little easier - but it also makes Eradicate missions and a few more mission difficulties even harder. A fair trade? You decide. You can read the game’s latest patch notes here.
