Too many people are playing Helldivers 2 – “Servers at capacity. Please try again later.”

18.02.2024 - 00:05 / thesixthaxis.com / Many

Could some of you stop playing Helldivers 2, please, so I can log in and blast some bugs for a bit? The popularity of the bug-blasting co-op shooter has continued to outpace the expectations of developer Arrowhead Game Studios, and the servers are totally overloaded right now.

Users trying to log in are very likely to see a “Servers at capacity. Please try again later.” error message, with the game having a countdown time before it will retry and see if space has opened up.

In a note on their Discord channel, Arrowhead has released the following statement:

Despite our best efforts to increase server capacity to accommodate all of you who want to dive for Freedom, we are experiencing capacity issues. We are once more working without delay to improve the issue and we hope to have a fix in place as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Arrowhead Dev team

However, given that it’s the weekend, it’s likely that server capacity will be strained throughout the weekend during peak playing hours.

SteamDB has the current number of players on PC via Steam at 231,926, with a 24 hour peak of 333,827 that was set at 7PM GMT, which is sixth in the most-played games on the platform for the past day. Factor in PlayStation 5 players on top of that as being around the same size player count, and the peak could be around 750,000 – though this is absolute napkin math territory.

Earlier in the week, Arrowhead revealed that they had to work with their partner hosting services to raise rate limiters and total concurrent capacity of players. On 11th February, they raised the figure from 250,000 concurrent players to 360,000… with that new capacity limit being hit 5 1/2 minutes later. It’s not clear how much they’ve been able to increase the server capacity in the past week, but the studio was concerned ahead of the weekend about their ability to hold up under the pleasant surprise of having a major hit on their hands.

That’s a good problem to have, but has also seen the team scramble with a slew of rapid-fire updates aiming to fix key issues matchmaking, lighten the load that users put on servers, and squish as many crash bugs as possible. This weekend marks the first in-game event with defensive missions, and with game rewards having failed to be handed out at times this past week, Arrowhead has also increased the rewards by 50% through Sunday.

A game that revels in the glorious excess of interstellar warfare and huge explosive weaponry, for our Helldivers 2 review, I said, “A naked shower scene away from being an official Starship Troopers game, Helldivers 2 is gloriously daft fun when you can get a group of friends together to play. It’s just a shame about the matchmaking and crash bugs at launch.”

Right, I’ve killed enough time writing up