Helldiver's 2's latest patch bumped the concurrent user cap from around 450,000 to 700,000 which (alongside an AFK kick timer of around 15 minutes) should make Arrowhead Games' triumphant horde shooter actually playable for the majority of divers.
Should is the operative word here, though—as several devs shared earlier this week, servers for online games are nightmare labyrinths of code and systems, designed specifically to raise the blood pressure of back-end engineers. Still, Arrowhead Games' CEO Johan Pilestedt was excited enough by recent developments to share an accidentally-optimistic (now deleted) post on Twitter, as preserved by the patriots over at the Helldivers 2 subreddit.
IT HAPPENED!! from r/Helldivers
"Everyone should be able to get past the login screen now", a no-doubt sleep deprived CEO tweeted yesterday. Almost immediately afterwards, a second (also deleted) tweet attempted to clarify the situation, as noted by CosmicSploogeDrizzle in the comments.
Perhaps realising he was at risk of over-promising, Pilestedt then executed a swift U-turn. "Sorry for my last three tweets," Pilestedt writes. "I unfortunately can't edit them and I was less than crystal. I blame it being 2 am." He then clarifies that while the cap was increased, and that Helldivers 2 is able to handle its current weekday peak, "we will hit the cap again at some point … we don't yet know if we can support everyone this weekend."
Prompted by the sage counsel of a player on Twitter, Pilestedt decided to delete both prior tweets to help stamp out confusion. "You know what? I am actually doing [that]. What this amazing person said. Helping a poor soul awake at 2 am make good decisions."
Lastly in a (not deleted at the time of writing) tweet, Pilestedt finally settled on the following dispatch from high command: "We have updated the max CCU cap to 700,000. Unfortunately, we expect the CCU to reach that level. We believe that the wait times will be much more bearable. Tomorrow we are doing some final improvements for the weekend."
While this whole saga is very funny, I can't help but feel for the guy—and I'm certainly only poking fun out of empathy. Who among us has not tweeted, then deleted, at 2 am? I've also no doubt the scene at Arrowhead Games HQ has been a complete warzone over the past week or so, and no-one's articulate when their brain is fried from overtime.
At least anecdotally, Arrowhead's measures have proven effective on weeknights in my UK time zone. The weekend is a different beast entirely of course, though, if we run into server queues again I can only imagine they'll be a far cry from the outright-locked doors some players suffered last Saturday and Sunday.
