The team over at Arrowhead Games has been wildly busy with Helldivers 2—which is to be expected. After a meteoric rise in concurrent players that forced a raised cap to 700,000, the game's playerbase has swelled to near-unmanageable levels which, as you might imagine, would keep a community manager very busy.
So busy in fact that Discord mistook said community manager for an automaton. At around 4 pm GMT February 21, Katherine Baskin (who is also the author of those charming Super Earth High Command dispatches you see on the game's official Discord server) was locked out of her account due to "sending too many DMs too fast."
"The Helldivers 2 server has over 400,000 people in it and I get [hundreds] of DMs a day about game support, moderation, etc," Baskin wrote. "Can I get my account re-enabled pls? Sent in a ticket too." In a reply, she added: "I mean, I'm flattered Discord thinks I type fast enough to be a robot, but come on."
Unfortunately, Baskin would be met with radio silence—long enough to create a huge backlog of work for the besieged manager. That's despite raising a ticket and tagging the app's support multiple times on Twitter.
"I keep reading horror stories of Discord support never responding to these tickets," Baskin wrote at around 8 am GMT on February 23. "I'm still locked out of my account that owns the Helldivers 2 Discord. Literally can't do my job and now a weekend is approaching when more people will pour into the discord and game." Finally, Arrowhead Games CEO Johan Pilestedt rolled up his sleeves and got involved:
That seemed to do the trick. At 10:40 am GMT, February 23, community manager Baskin was finally allowed to manage the community again. Assuming she took to Twitter at around the time she both lost and regained access, Baskin was locked out of her account for roughly 42 hours. "I'm going to bet tagging in the big boss Pilestedt was the right move," she said.
While the cynic in me expects support to be understaffed or underfunded across the board in apps like Discord, it's still pretty shocking that the community manager of one of the biggest breakout games this year wasn't able to get their attention without dragging her company's CEO into the melee. Still, I'm glad she's back—the silence from high command while I was defending Mantes from the automaton scourge last night was unsettling.
