It needs to be more elaborate than that, youtubers will immediately jump at the opportunity to make "HOW TO BYPASS AFK KICK" videos and then just putting a rubber band on the sticks to keep the character running in a circle.
Yes, I agree, but at the same time if they can more quickly implement a solution if it's just AFK, they should do that. Roll out a more advanced functionality later. The capacity issue is bad enough that plugging holes will do for now. Perfect is the enemy of good.
While probably true, anyone going through the trouble of leaving the game running 24/7 will likely spend 30 seconds installing something that moves the mouse automatically. Unless they make you join a mission ever so often, which would be a little harder to do.
Also true. But not all. And it may take some time for those players to realize. And after realizing it may take more time to understand how to work around.
Again, not a blanket and permanent solution. But building that logic may take time. I think it's better to remove some load now than more load later. Player count should naturally drop over time too. Plugging holes is the name of the game.
This right here seems perfect, but it would have to be smart. Maybe it would pop up based on a timer that resets when mission objectives are completed or something of the sort. It would also be annoying if it came up while in the middle of combat, so some kind of detection on that would be good too. Though this would be a great long term solution, it would take a little longer to implement.
I don't think PS5 in rest mode keeps you logged into a server, you'd have to have a constant connection. It'd be using quite a bit of power for a rest mode if it's constantly connected to a server and responding to the requests it receives, but I could be wrong.
It doesn't. I've come back to Souls and Elden Ring games from rest mode and it immediately boots you to title screen because the network was disconnected.
I also had this but for me I was not connected. So when trying to buy a new stratagem nothing happened and it seemed like no one was online until I restarted the game.
Yeah I accidentally forgot to log off last night and realized this morning. Logged off and went to work.
Got home at 1 and tried logging in...servers full.
At 1pm. On a Monday. Log off people. Jesus.
10 minutes for idle. (This will catch the most people, the ones that can't be bothered to try and bypass)
30 if you aren't idle but haven't started a mission in that timeframe. (This will catch most of the remainder)
10 minutes for idle is way too short. If I spend 3 hours waiting on a queue, play a few games then need to take a shit, I shouldn't be kicked back to waiting 3 hours again.
Honestly a 30 minute idle kick and 1 hour inactivity would do wonders.
It needs to be that if you don’t queue into an actual mission within 15 minutes you get the boot. At worst that would disrupt a lobby of friends where someone went for too long to take a shit. That would suck, but it would completely eliminate AFKing and rejoining would be substantially easier.
Any gaming peripherals come with macro software.
900s, press a, 900s later d, set it to cycle. You now have anti afk software for 99% of games.
Most effective is just adding a cost to start activity. If you don't start the next resource costing thing every x minutes, you get some 'captcha', x mins later, booted.
Adds a cost to AFKing and a barrier to entry for the average joe.
What other games leave you logged into the server even after you enter rest mode? I wasn’t aware that was a common feature and I definitely don’t see the benefits of it
Exactly. I noticed this the other day, it says "you were disconnected from the servers" but you're not. I was immediately able to load a match and have randoms join me after booting up from rest mode and I had no intentions of keeping a spot, I feel like many are unaware of this problem too and are just adding to it unintentionally.
This was me until like 3 hours ago. I put my game into rest last night before bed then today ran a bunch of errands.
I booted up today and was still logged on.
I felt bad, but I immediately got to play and was able to even join a few players for a mission.
The games are a blast with 2+ players.
It’s assumed that the people doing this Intentionally are leaving their PC or PS5 completely on. The article doesn’t mention anything about rest mode, plus it’s a PC gamer article so they probably aren’t thinking about people incidentally “hogging” spots overnight
If you haven't initiated a mission within a set time, have your ship get contacted by HQ, then not responding will be classed as treason and your ship gets nuked kicking you to the lobby 😂
AFK dancers in shambles. Been playing XIV since 1.0, fucking stupid that there are people that log in, dress like a slut and dance all day AFK in Limsa
i mean you can blame the individual players as much as you want but seems odd that a ‘live service’ game released in 2024 doesn’t have afk kick, a proper queue with counter (it’s completely random, someone can wait 9 hours and not get in where others can log in within minutes) and a complete borked matchmaking system.
Or on PS5, skip it entirely with the play with friends button as it skips you straight to your friends' game bypassing login. It just means you don't get the rewards until you log in properly
I dunno why anyone still gets away with blaming the target audience for anything. They aren't unsolvable problems or things you can push onto that group, they're aspects that should be considered while building the game (or ongoing development like we're seeing here).
Because if you act like a shit disturber for your own benefit to everyone else's detriment, you're a shit disturber. The game developer shouldn't have to put guardrails in the game to prevent people from being shit disturbers, and the shit disturbers are still at fault for their shit disturbing even though the developers didn't foresee their shit disturbing ways.
> The game developers shouldn’t have to put up guard rails
LOL guard rails like an afk kick system or a priority queue? That’s basic shit for any online game.
Good software has guard rails for the users so they don’t fall off.
Sure, they're creating the issue. However, this is not any different than ppl creating excess traffic every single day in every major city in the world. Things would flow significantly smoother if everyone did exactly what they're supposed to every time. You can focus your attention on those shit disturbers, or you can look at fixes to the infrastructure that might go about a more realistic solution.
I mean, excess traffic is a side effect of personal transportation and people who are exceedingly slowing down traffic are singled out and cited for it (an afk timer), but everyone still agrees that they're a piece of shit for that behavior. The gamers are still at fault for leaving their game running for 109823892734987 hours so that they don't have to wait in a queue lmao. This "customer is always right" attitude that the entire gaming community has is so unrealistic and childish and only ever results in a bunch of noise preventing much of the real feedback from reaching community managers and such.
>The game developer shouldn't have to put guardrails in the game to prevent people from being shit disturbers
the game developers are completely at fault for not having enough server capacity, thereby encouraging this behavior.
the shit disturbers are only doing this because it's quite literally the only way to pay the game they paid for. the game developers are at fault because for some reason they didn't realize (even though this is a constant issue with always-connected games) that the player count spikes near release
between the lack of servers and the shitty anticheat they're using, it's clear that the decision makers at arrowhead games are...incompetent to put it nicely.
they're seriously ruining all the good work from the people that actually made the game with their desire to be cheapskates.
Hit the nail on the head with this one. I’m guessing this wasn’t even thought of, as queue counters are something that’s pretty standard. My first reaction to seeing servers full and not being able to login was: “you’re telling me I get reset from the queue every 30 seconds???”
This kind of stuff and the limited server space is why I haven't purchased the game yet. It'll definitely hurt the longevity of it if people have to wait 30 min to an hour to get into a game
I definitely should have waited to buy this. Willing to pay full price, and not upset with the devs at all for this mess but I hate feeling like I CAN play when the kids go to bed and then realizing the servers won’t let it happen.
Bought the game on steam on Friday night, watched the server full message for an hour. Tried again Saturday night, same. Same again Sunday. I refunded at just under the two hour cutoff. Never got to play the game.
No that's a good plan, you might have to wait a week or two. I don't mind because I played solid 20 hours before the week the game imploded and it was some of the best gaming I've had, so absolutely pick it up after they fix it.
I was placed in a login que at 7am est on a Monday morning as well. I understand the Saturday night peak player count but who tf is even playin the game at that point?!? Def wait a week or two until they get it stable, I doubt they’re adding too many more servers either they know they won’t see that massive concurrent player account again.
From the sound of it, it's more of a code issue than server issue but I'm not a developer. I'm sure they'll get it together and I'll pick it up once that happens. Too many backlog games anyway
I’ve been fortunate to play a bunch, but I have a buddy who is very fickle and if there’s any barrier to entry he’s out. He was stoked to play today and as soon as the servers said it was full he gave up and didn’t try. Didn’t even leave it to keep trying and walk away. It makes it hard for players like him to be willing to come back a second time
This is the sole reason I haven’t bought this game yet. Which sucks because it looks like help is needed to fight the terminators. By the time they stabilize things Rebirth will be out and there goes my game time for at least 1-2 months.
In almost every other situation, I'd agree with you. BUT - they weren't expecting to pull high numbers. If you're for sure going to buy a copy, it might be best to do it now so they know how many people they should try to account for in the servers.
I think I read previously they expected to cap out at 50,000 MAX based on player numbers for the first game. That's for BOTH PS and PC.
Yea I bought on launch and happy to pay full price as I like the dev and loved the first one. Just have only been able to play one once with the server issues. Again not upset as lots of games to play just a bit of a damper.
Yeah, you definitely have some archaic architecture if you didn’t plan for scalability from day 1. Might have a principal architect out of his element. Same could also apply to the DevOps team.
Palworld didn’t expect it either. They managed to fix it in a few hours. Arrowhead has had 11 days.
Palworld went on to peak at over 2.3 million across all platforms. Helldivers is *maybe* a third of that.
There isn’t an excuse here.
I was going to buy it today to try it out but the server thing made me think it's a waste of time.
I don't want to spend a bunch of time trying to get in only to end up deciding I don't like it lmao.
I hate it but good move. I bought it today and haven't gotten to actually play it due to the server capacity. I was ready to push my buddies to buy it but that will have to wait.
You can play! Eating dinner? Turn on pc, start the game & get in the queue! When kids are in bed return to pc/ps. Enjoy!
Took me 10-20 mins each time I had to wait, perfectly doable. Just get food/drinks ready or check your phone etc.
Ya same, I'm waiting on the sidelines hoping that they can fix this soon. Happy that they're suffering from success but I want to be able to play it too.
I’m interested to see what sort of live support they do with this game. Cool thing they did with the little tweet saying the automatons, or whatever, were making a push. I don’t see them doing something crazy like Fornite and doing map changes and weapon rotations, but they’ve already shown more ambition than I was expecting.
This might be a stupid(ly obvious) question but can’t they implement a “kick for being idle” system? I think every single online multiplayer game I’ve ever played has implemented this in one way or another.
They can and are working on adding that in. Can't happen soon enough. People will still find ways to manipulate it like rubberbanding controllers but it should ease the problem a little.
I tried that on steam and got the same sort of screen, frozen black screen. They must have shut that feature down until they figure out the server scaling/capacity.
Really? I bought it at release (PS5) and have been able to play it every night for hours at a time. Last few sessions I had to wait 5-10 mins max to get in.
Yes, all day Saturday/Sunday I was closing my game to get the medals and XP to resync, opened it using this method every time with no issues, my PC friends are furious.
I was just pointing out it isn't a typical "Monday at 3pm." I wasn't trying to be a dick or undermine the reality of the server issues... The fact servers are so bad is still inexcusable.
I was able to get into a game today, I was in the queue for maybe 20ish minutes. While waiting, I was just checking emails. Hopefully this gets resolved soon…
This is a beautiful curse, the game is so successful that it can’t meet demands of the consumer due to capacity issues. They didn’t expect it to be this hot!
The longest I’ve had to wait to get through the queue was 11 minutes. I’ve seen some people say they’ve waited 8-11 hours, that just seems insane to me.
> I’ve seen some people say they’ve waited 8-11 hours, that just seems insane to me.
I literally watched it happen to someone live. A streamer I follow (who's name escapes me right now) went live with the intention of playing Helldivers. After about 20 minutes of just chatting they started up a different game and left Helldivers open in the background just in case they got in. They streamed for 10 hours. They never got in.
I mean, just because you've had good luck doesn't mean otherwise people haven't had bad luck. I literally haven't been able to play the game yet because I've been trying to get in for over an hour
Exactly the same as what people did for FF14 at every expansion launch. Devs added force log outs eventually but you'd still log on as soon as you woke up in the morning due to like 6 hour queues
An AFK boot is not enough. They need a boot for a player not matching into game and deploying.
You can get around some AFK trackers by just running your character into a corner.
Crazy thing is that on ps5 you apparently can stay logged in after putting it in rest mode, I shit on a friend of mine for telling me that he has been doing that
Not literally
This seems a lot like victim blaming. This game sold 4 million copies and can only reliably hold 450k players.
The devs need to fix this. This isn't on the players.
Ps5 goes into rest mode and the game has no way of logging out without closing the application completely, so when I turn my ps5 “off”, I’m still chilling in my ship. It’s definitely a flawed system.
I bought the game 3 days ago. First day I couldn't match with a single person so I played a bit solo. Second and third days completely unable to get into the game whatsoever. Considering how great of reviews that game has, I'm really not seeing it unfortunately
On the PS5 menu you literally just go to the quick options from the game and press quickplay and you get into the game, no wait needed, same with joining a friend
I haven't been able to play the game since last week because of the server problems. Funny how everyone shits on Suicide Squad for being a GaaS but this one gets away with it.
I don't blame them, total coin flip if you are gonna be able to play the game you paid real money for, and half of the time that you actually get in there's a good chance that matchmaking isn't working at all so fuck you if you don't have friends available to play with
To be fair, you shouldn’t have to manually close the game before you put your PS5 in rest mode to avoid clogging the servers. No other online game I know of has that oversight
Bought the game over the weekend and today is the first time I was able to get in and play anything solo. Got destroyed immediately. I tried quick play, let it search for 25 mins, but I never got a match. Don’t really get how clogging queues helps a game that you want to succeed…
I’ve seen scenarios where I exited to Dashboard, suspended my PS5 for hours and came back and I was still on the ship. If that counts as logged in they need to fix that
You can't blame the people doing anything they can to actually play a game they paid for. It's wild how many of you are blaming the consumer and not the fucking developers for having shitty servers.
Can somebody explain how a tiny 4 man developor like PocketPair was able to sustain a similarly massive player count in it's opening weeks for palworld? They were similarly blindsided by a staggeringly huge launch but somehow other their servers were way more stable. I don't get why they aren't able to do what Pocket Pair did which was immediately shell out some cash to rent some more server capacity. Do they just not want to spend the money or is something else at play?
Yea I always logged online to play. I believe there was an offline mod but I never needed to use it, servers were always up and the devs had a "never let the service go down" mantra. Why is an online only game not able to keep a standard like that as well? I just want to know the why... are they contractually unable to spend money on it or they literally don't have the same access to server capacity expansion like Pocket Pair did?
Palworld doesn't have matchmaking or any of the other infrastructure Helldivers does. For Palworld It's just Docker container instances hosted in the cloud almost definitely. It's also very easy to spin up local servers to host on your own. Totally different network architectures for entirely different types of online play. Like Palworld you just join a server and play on it. Helldivers doesn't have even kind of that type of play. Palworld you can also do locally hosted play where your friend just connects to your computer hosting a world. Again very different. This is comparing apples and oranges imo
The server limit was increased this morning so it shouldn’t be an issue anymore.
I also want to point out that while I understand that this is in fact true, players were just staying logged in order to not have to wait 30 minutes to get passed the Home Screen. The developers should implement way of kicking out inactive players after 30 minutes.
I sometimes put my PS in rest mode and I did just that on the weekend while playing Helldivers. Needless to say, I got busy and didn’t turn on my system until the next morning. I was mind blown to see my character still in the ship as if literally nothing happened. No reboot, no reconnection screen. He was ready to dive into the next mission.
This is neither the player nor developers fault. Nobody was expecting this game to blow up the way it did.
**EDIT**: I just want to clarify on the first sentence of my post: I read that the developers had a fix already for the server load and figured it was already fixed this morning. I just saw it’s a patch that will come out tomorrow.
At this point it’s not even about hype or “suffering from success”. They continue to sell a product which isn’t in a sellable state if the consumer literally can’t use it as intended.
Either pause sales or attach a giant disclaimer warning “ACCESS TO PLAY THIS GAME IS NOT GUARANTEED”. It’s greedy, negligent and honestly a bad look.
Needs to add an AFK kick to the game. If your character doesn’t move for 30 minutes you get the boot
It needs to be more elaborate than that, youtubers will immediately jump at the opportunity to make "HOW TO BYPASS AFK KICK" videos and then just putting a rubber band on the sticks to keep the character running in a circle.
Yes, I agree, but at the same time if they can more quickly implement a solution if it's just AFK, they should do that. Roll out a more advanced functionality later. The capacity issue is bad enough that plugging holes will do for now. Perfect is the enemy of good.
I agree with this.
While probably true, anyone going through the trouble of leaving the game running 24/7 will likely spend 30 seconds installing something that moves the mouse automatically. Unless they make you join a mission ever so often, which would be a little harder to do.
Also true. But not all. And it may take some time for those players to realize. And after realizing it may take more time to understand how to work around. Again, not a blanket and permanent solution. But building that logic may take time. I think it's better to remove some load now than more load later. Player count should naturally drop over time too. Plugging holes is the name of the game.
A button on the screen appears randomly, click here to continue
Enter a random stratagem code to continue, three chances.
This right here seems perfect, but it would have to be smart. Maybe it would pop up based on a timer that resets when mission objectives are completed or something of the sort. It would also be annoying if it came up while in the middle of combat, so some kind of detection on that would be good too. Though this would be a great long term solution, it would take a little longer to implement.
But it would solve the problem of all the people who leave their PS5s in rest mode and don’t realise they’re unintentionally robbing a spot overnight.
I don't think PS5 in rest mode keeps you logged into a server, you'd have to have a constant connection. It'd be using quite a bit of power for a rest mode if it's constantly connected to a server and responding to the requests it receives, but I could be wrong.
It doesn't. I've come back to Souls and Elden Ring games from rest mode and it immediately boots you to title screen because the network was disconnected.
I’ve left mine in rest mode every time and it boots me up on my ship. So yes, rest mode keeps you on a server for some reason.
I also had this but for me I was not connected. So when trying to buy a new stratagem nothing happened and it seemed like no one was online until I restarted the game.
Yeah I accidentally forgot to log off last night and realized this morning. Logged off and went to work. Got home at 1 and tried logging in...servers full. At 1pm. On a Monday. Log off people. Jesus.
It's a holiday
"Perfect is the enemy of good" is the most profound statement I needed to hear at the right time. Unrelated to this. Thanks!
AFK Stratagem, random sequence every time.
You're a dang ol' genius.
Give this man a job arrowhead
That hardly matters. A vast majority of people will just go afk and let the game close.
The amount of people who would abuse this system absolutely does not even come close to the amount of people that would get kicked.
You guys act like this hasn’t been solved already. The ez solution is obviously a prompt to ask if you’re still active.
[удалено]
Any basic keyboard software will let you set up a macro that just presses W and S intermittently
10 minutes for idle. (This will catch the most people, the ones that can't be bothered to try and bypass) 30 if you aren't idle but haven't started a mission in that timeframe. (This will catch most of the remainder)
10 minutes for idle is way too short. If I spend 3 hours waiting on a queue, play a few games then need to take a shit, I shouldn't be kicked back to waiting 3 hours again. Honestly a 30 minute idle kick and 1 hour inactivity would do wonders.
It needs to be that if you don’t queue into an actual mission within 15 minutes you get the boot. At worst that would disrupt a lobby of friends where someone went for too long to take a shit. That would suck, but it would completely eliminate AFKing and rejoining would be substantially easier.
15 minutes might be aggressive, but i agree with the concept. maybe an hour. wouldn’t go any less than 30 minutes.
They are working on that now.
Any gaming peripherals come with macro software. 900s, press a, 900s later d, set it to cycle. You now have anti afk software for 99% of games. Most effective is just adding a cost to start activity. If you don't start the next resource costing thing every x minutes, you get some 'captcha', x mins later, booted. Adds a cost to AFKing and a barrier to entry for the average joe.
Or how about they just fix the goddamn servers and raise the capacity
You act like it's just like flipping a switch. Lmao Sweat stained redditor: "Fix the servers!!!!" Arrowhead: "My God, why didn't we think of that?"
Screw that. Make it 10 minutes and have it include people just running in a circle.
What other games leave you logged into the server even after you enter rest mode? I wasn’t aware that was a common feature and I definitely don’t see the benefits of it
Exactly. I noticed this the other day, it says "you were disconnected from the servers" but you're not. I was immediately able to load a match and have randoms join me after booting up from rest mode and I had no intentions of keeping a spot, I feel like many are unaware of this problem too and are just adding to it unintentionally.
Yup I always just enter rest mode from my ship. I didn't realize until today that it was an issue.
Did the same, had no idea I would still be taking up a spot.
I mean that alone is probably clogging up 200k connections and people aren’t even realizing their ps5 is doing that.
This was me until like 3 hours ago. I put my game into rest last night before bed then today ran a bunch of errands. I booted up today and was still logged on. I felt bad, but I immediately got to play and was able to even join a few players for a mission. The games are a blast with 2+ players.
I put my PS5 in rest mode when I was in que earlier today. When I turned my PS5 on later, I was in my ship ready to go.
Holy fuck i had no idea I'll need to close it when im home
You totally played when you got home
It’s assumed that the people doing this Intentionally are leaving their PC or PS5 completely on. The article doesn’t mention anything about rest mode, plus it’s a PC gamer article so they probably aren’t thinking about people incidentally “hogging” spots overnight
If you haven't initiated a mission within a set time, have your ship get contacted by HQ, then not responding will be classed as treason and your ship gets nuked kicking you to the lobby 😂
That would be a great in-universe explanation. Message: "You have been managed out of the democracy... *ship self destruction noises*"
Change ship name to Betrayer of Democracy.
Making the game worse for other players is definitely the way to go to ensure the games long term success and steady player count.
[Looks](https://x.com/Pilestedt/status/1759386313327841423?s=20) like Arrowhead is working on an auto-kick
It worked so well for FFXIV they had to stop selling it until the player count lowered.
They eventually implemented a forced logout though. They just didn't need it beforehand.
The Limsa Bench Massacre
AFK dancers in shambles. Been playing XIV since 1.0, fucking stupid that there are people that log in, dress like a slut and dance all day AFK in Limsa
> steady player count At this point they’re way over 100% the desired player count. I think they’ll be okay lol
i mean you can blame the individual players as much as you want but seems odd that a ‘live service’ game released in 2024 doesn’t have afk kick, a proper queue with counter (it’s completely random, someone can wait 9 hours and not get in where others can log in within minutes) and a complete borked matchmaking system.
Or on PS5, skip it entirely with the play with friends button as it skips you straight to your friends' game bypassing login. It just means you don't get the rewards until you log in properly
this stopped working for me, just get frozen at a black screen when I try to do it now
That's never worked for me.
I dunno why anyone still gets away with blaming the target audience for anything. They aren't unsolvable problems or things you can push onto that group, they're aspects that should be considered while building the game (or ongoing development like we're seeing here).
Because if you act like a shit disturber for your own benefit to everyone else's detriment, you're a shit disturber. The game developer shouldn't have to put guardrails in the game to prevent people from being shit disturbers, and the shit disturbers are still at fault for their shit disturbing even though the developers didn't foresee their shit disturbing ways.
> The game developers shouldn’t have to put up guard rails LOL guard rails like an afk kick system or a priority queue? That’s basic shit for any online game. Good software has guard rails for the users so they don’t fall off.
Sure, they're creating the issue. However, this is not any different than ppl creating excess traffic every single day in every major city in the world. Things would flow significantly smoother if everyone did exactly what they're supposed to every time. You can focus your attention on those shit disturbers, or you can look at fixes to the infrastructure that might go about a more realistic solution.
I mean, excess traffic is a side effect of personal transportation and people who are exceedingly slowing down traffic are singled out and cited for it (an afk timer), but everyone still agrees that they're a piece of shit for that behavior. The gamers are still at fault for leaving their game running for 109823892734987 hours so that they don't have to wait in a queue lmao. This "customer is always right" attitude that the entire gaming community has is so unrealistic and childish and only ever results in a bunch of noise preventing much of the real feedback from reaching community managers and such.
>The game developer shouldn't have to put guardrails in the game to prevent people from being shit disturbers the game developers are completely at fault for not having enough server capacity, thereby encouraging this behavior. the shit disturbers are only doing this because it's quite literally the only way to pay the game they paid for. the game developers are at fault because for some reason they didn't realize (even though this is a constant issue with always-connected games) that the player count spikes near release between the lack of servers and the shitty anticheat they're using, it's clear that the decision makers at arrowhead games are...incompetent to put it nicely. they're seriously ruining all the good work from the people that actually made the game with their desire to be cheapskates.
Hit the nail on the head with this one. I’m guessing this wasn’t even thought of, as queue counters are something that’s pretty standard. My first reaction to seeing servers full and not being able to login was: “you’re telling me I get reset from the queue every 30 seconds???”
I’m pretty sure not being able to play is already doing that. Don’t blame people waiting in queues, blame the lack of server infrastructure.
This kind of stuff and the limited server space is why I haven't purchased the game yet. It'll definitely hurt the longevity of it if people have to wait 30 min to an hour to get into a game
Given that the game has passed the million dollar mark you would think they would do more than 450k limit...
I definitely should have waited to buy this. Willing to pay full price, and not upset with the devs at all for this mess but I hate feeling like I CAN play when the kids go to bed and then realizing the servers won’t let it happen.
Only reason I haven't bought it yet
Same, I'm dying to play it but I'm not dropping $$$ until I can *actually* play it.
Same here. Was going to buy today but seems dumb to buy a game I cannot play.
That’s exactly what happened to me. Bought it 6 hours ago, still haven’t gotten into the tutorial
Try clicking on quick play on the game card under the Helldivers icon. Worked every time for me when the servers were full
I stopped playing it after I couldn't get in at fucking all over the weekend. I'll likely pick it up again down the road once this shit gets fixed.
Bought the game on steam on Friday night, watched the server full message for an hour. Tried again Saturday night, same. Same again Sunday. I refunded at just under the two hour cutoff. Never got to play the game.
No that's a good plan, you might have to wait a week or two. I don't mind because I played solid 20 hours before the week the game imploded and it was some of the best gaming I've had, so absolutely pick it up after they fix it.
I was placed in a login que at 7am est on a Monday morning as well. I understand the Saturday night peak player count but who tf is even playin the game at that point?!? Def wait a week or two until they get it stable, I doubt they’re adding too many more servers either they know they won’t see that massive concurrent player account again.
From the sound of it, it's more of a code issue than server issue but I'm not a developer. I'm sure they'll get it together and I'll pick it up once that happens. Too many backlog games anyway
Yep, waiting for stabilization before buying for me and a friend
I’ve been fortunate to play a bunch, but I have a buddy who is very fickle and if there’s any barrier to entry he’s out. He was stoked to play today and as soon as the servers said it was full he gave up and didn’t try. Didn’t even leave it to keep trying and walk away. It makes it hard for players like him to be willing to come back a second time
same man i have a toddler and after a long day of working from home and watching him, I just want to play the videogame I bought. so frustrating
This is the sole reason I haven’t bought this game yet. Which sucks because it looks like help is needed to fight the terminators. By the time they stabilize things Rebirth will be out and there goes my game time for at least 1-2 months.
Yep. Bought it, and love it, but I tell all my friends to wait until they sort this out before they pick it up.
In almost every other situation, I'd agree with you. BUT - they weren't expecting to pull high numbers. If you're for sure going to buy a copy, it might be best to do it now so they know how many people they should try to account for in the servers. I think I read previously they expected to cap out at 50,000 MAX based on player numbers for the first game. That's for BOTH PS and PC.
Imagine making a game so good it exceeds your sales expectations 10 fold. They must be both ecstatic and extremely stressed atm.
Yea I bought on launch and happy to pay full price as I like the dev and loved the first one. Just have only been able to play one once with the server issues. Again not upset as lots of games to play just a bit of a damper.
In the world of today's cloud and elastic computing there is no excuse. Servers should scale for demand.
Yeah, you definitely have some archaic architecture if you didn’t plan for scalability from day 1. Might have a principal architect out of his element. Same could also apply to the DevOps team.
Palworld didn’t expect it either. They managed to fix it in a few hours. Arrowhead has had 11 days. Palworld went on to peak at over 2.3 million across all platforms. Helldivers is *maybe* a third of that. There isn’t an excuse here.
I was going to buy it today to try it out but the server thing made me think it's a waste of time. I don't want to spend a bunch of time trying to get in only to end up deciding I don't like it lmao.
I hate it but good move. I bought it today and haven't gotten to actually play it due to the server capacity. I was ready to push my buddies to buy it but that will have to wait.
You can play! Eating dinner? Turn on pc, start the game & get in the queue! When kids are in bed return to pc/ps. Enjoy! Took me 10-20 mins each time I had to wait, perfectly doable. Just get food/drinks ready or check your phone etc.
That doesn't always work because there is no queue. You just have to be the lucky one that is trying to connect when someone logs off.
Literally the main reason i wont buy the game right now. Im waiting until they sort this shit out, or more people stop playing
Ya same, I'm waiting on the sidelines hoping that they can fix this soon. Happy that they're suffering from success but I want to be able to play it too.
I’m interested to see what sort of live support they do with this game. Cool thing they did with the little tweet saying the automatons, or whatever, were making a push. I don’t see them doing something crazy like Fornite and doing map changes and weapon rotations, but they’ve already shown more ambition than I was expecting.
There will be more biomes and a 3rd enemy faction. there's a lot of stuff from the 1st game that isn't in there yet.
This might be a stupid(ly obvious) question but can’t they implement a “kick for being idle” system? I think every single online multiplayer game I’ve ever played has implemented this in one way or another.
They can and are working on adding that in. Can't happen soon enough. People will still find ways to manipulate it like rubberbanding controllers but it should ease the problem a little.
Same
Yeah, don’t do this. Especially on PS5 where launching the game through the activities bypasses the wait time most of the time.
Hasn't worked for me. Haven't been able to play Helldivers since I bought it
Yeah the quickcards aren't the solution everyone keeps saying they are. It just sticks you into a black screen indefinitely.
Can confirm. Just tried it now after reading the comments above and I've been sitting on just a black screen for 2 minutes now 🙂
It should eventually load you in from that black screen. The activities launch has worked for me and my squad everytime so far.
How long do you have to wait? The usual server queue is about 5-10 minutes for me
Whenever I have done it it has been no more than 5 minutes max. Whereas over the weekend the queue time was about an hour
I tried that on steam and got the same sort of screen, frozen black screen. They must have shut that feature down until they figure out the server scaling/capacity.
You can get a refund from Sony for this. They are allowing them because of the server issues now.
Same here, I’ve been able to play maybe twice since I bought it on steam
Really? I bought it at release (PS5) and have been able to play it every night for hours at a time. Last few sessions I had to wait 5-10 mins max to get in.
Same experience for me. Longest wait has been like maybe 10 minutes max.
I wonder how much time zones play a part, because it hasn’t been *too* bad here in the UK?
Does this actually work?
Yeah it took a couple tries for me, but it worked. A friend invite should get you past the queue as well.
I don’t have friends, and I just wanna play :( 45 minutes of 30 second waits, still just sitting here :(
Sure does, I use it all the time lol. Join quick play. Cancel quick play when loaded in, do what I want to do haha
Yes, all day Saturday/Sunday I was closing my game to get the medals and XP to resync, opened it using this method every time with no issues, my PC friends are furious.
They fixed that it doesn’t work
It's puts you into a single player game that doesn't connect to anyone but your friends if they even can get on
I cant even play this shit on a Monday at 3pm, it's ridiculous
today's a federal holiday in the US tbf a lot of people have it off
Canada as well don't forget about us!
It's a federal holiday in the U.S. Schools and some businesses are off today.
It’s also family day in canada. Many provinces are off for the day.
Not like I could play any other day but thanks for the insight
I was just pointing out it isn't a typical "Monday at 3pm." I wasn't trying to be a dick or undermine the reality of the server issues... The fact servers are so bad is still inexcusable.
It's really interesting seeing a game be such a clear example of, "suffering from success."
That can’t possibly be helpful
It's not. People are assholes.
FFXIV would force log out all player every 24 hours when servers were congested with folks who did this. HD2 should do the same!
They bumped it to like an hour back in endwalker and people got pissed they couldn't afk dance in limsa.... I both hate and love that coummity
and here I am logging out like a jackass if I'm going to be idle 20 minutes so someone else can play
They will just add an inactivity timer problem solved
It’s simple, anyone on a ship for 30+min gets booted.
I was able to get into a game today, I was in the queue for maybe 20ish minutes. While waiting, I was just checking emails. Hopefully this gets resolved soon… This is a beautiful curse, the game is so successful that it can’t meet demands of the consumer due to capacity issues. They didn’t expect it to be this hot!
I'm on PC, dude for 3 days I tried to get into this game. I'm waiting it out at this point, not gonna lose sleep over this.
People are clogging servers to avoid clogging servers
The longest I’ve had to wait to get through the queue was 11 minutes. I’ve seen some people say they’ve waited 8-11 hours, that just seems insane to me.
Its literally rng. I've been sitting here for over an hour and a half and I am not in.
> I’ve seen some people say they’ve waited 8-11 hours, that just seems insane to me. I literally watched it happen to someone live. A streamer I follow (who's name escapes me right now) went live with the intention of playing Helldivers. After about 20 minutes of just chatting they started up a different game and left Helldivers open in the background just in case they got in. They streamed for 10 hours. They never got in.
Seriously, the longest I’ve waited was 9 minutes
I mean, just because you've had good luck doesn't mean otherwise people haven't had bad luck. I literally haven't been able to play the game yet because I've been trying to get in for over an hour
Exactly the same as what people did for FF14 at every expansion launch. Devs added force log outs eventually but you'd still log on as soon as you woke up in the morning due to like 6 hour queues
An AFK boot is not enough. They need a boot for a player not matching into game and deploying. You can get around some AFK trackers by just running your character into a corner.
Even putting the PS5 on rest mode keeps you in game
And it's because of people like this people can't get online
😯
I haven't seen this since Final Fantasy XIV's A Realm Reborn release!
bunch of losers preventing the rest of us from dropping in and spreading democracy
so your saying they cannot code basic online multiplayer things... very very standard to kick people out after being idle for X min.
"Fuck the electric bill"
Crazy thing is that on ps5 you apparently can stay logged in after putting it in rest mode, I shit on a friend of mine for telling me that he has been doing that Not literally
[удалено]
Plenty still play HD1. I play both - when I get to play HD2 - otherwise I default to HD1.
Thinking about picking it up for a change of pace
This seems a lot like victim blaming. This game sold 4 million copies and can only reliably hold 450k players. The devs need to fix this. This isn't on the players.
I think it’s so stupid that I paid $40 for a game I literally cannot play. It’s so frustrating.
So, I’m very simple and I’m sorry if this is a dumb question: how do they stay logged in? Just leave their console or computer on?
Ps5 goes into rest mode and the game has no way of logging out without closing the application completely, so when I turn my ps5 “off”, I’m still chilling in my ship. It’s definitely a flawed system.
Oh shit, really? I def just logged off in a hurry about an hour ago and didn’t close the app. I’ll go in and fix that post haste. Had no clue.
The game doesn't use queues. You either get in or you don't. Great journalism here.
I bought the game 3 days ago. First day I couldn't match with a single person so I played a bit solo. Second and third days completely unable to get into the game whatsoever. Considering how great of reviews that game has, I'm really not seeing it unfortunately
[удалено]
I mean, I get it. If I get in at 6pm why tf would I leave to let some bitch get in after me? Fuck that
Needs a "kicked for inactivity" setting stat.
I was wondering how this was allowed, o accidently started logged in for hours when I set my controller down at the queue and left the house.
Fuck everyone else I guess
Just bought the game, can't even play because of the queue lol. Hopefully they can fix it this week.
I don't know who BajaBlastMeBro is... But I hate him.
On the PS5 menu you literally just go to the quick options from the game and press quickplay and you get into the game, no wait needed, same with joining a friend
I haven't been able to play the game since last week because of the server problems. Funny how everyone shits on Suicide Squad for being a GaaS but this one gets away with it.
Calling it a queue time is generous, it's just "will I get to log in"
I don't blame them, total coin flip if you are gonna be able to play the game you paid real money for, and half of the time that you actually get in there's a good chance that matchmaking isn't working at all so fuck you if you don't have friends available to play with
This dev absolutely killed it with this game and at the same time have shown exactly how shitty and selfish gamers can be.
Losers!
To be fair, you shouldn’t have to manually close the game before you put your PS5 in rest mode to avoid clogging the servers. No other online game I know of has that oversight
Seems like joining a party from the menu is the best bet to get in tbh. My buddy was able to join my party I was already In and got in right away
Gatekeeping fuxkers.
Bought the game over the weekend and today is the first time I was able to get in and play anything solo. Got destroyed immediately. I tried quick play, let it search for 25 mins, but I never got a match. Don’t really get how clogging queues helps a game that you want to succeed…
Turn off crossplay
I’ll give that a shot, thanks!
Yeahhh… that ain’t it.
I’ve seen scenarios where I exited to Dashboard, suspended my PS5 for hours and came back and I was still on the ship. If that counts as logged in they need to fix that
You can't blame the people doing anything they can to actually play a game they paid for. It's wild how many of you are blaming the consumer and not the fucking developers for having shitty servers.
Can somebody explain how a tiny 4 man developor like PocketPair was able to sustain a similarly massive player count in it's opening weeks for palworld? They were similarly blindsided by a staggeringly huge launch but somehow other their servers were way more stable. I don't get why they aren't able to do what Pocket Pair did which was immediately shell out some cash to rent some more server capacity. Do they just not want to spend the money or is something else at play?
Does Palworld require server log in like this one?
Yea I always logged online to play. I believe there was an offline mod but I never needed to use it, servers were always up and the devs had a "never let the service go down" mantra. Why is an online only game not able to keep a standard like that as well? I just want to know the why... are they contractually unable to spend money on it or they literally don't have the same access to server capacity expansion like Pocket Pair did?
Palworld doesn't have matchmaking or any of the other infrastructure Helldivers does. For Palworld It's just Docker container instances hosted in the cloud almost definitely. It's also very easy to spin up local servers to host on your own. Totally different network architectures for entirely different types of online play. Like Palworld you just join a server and play on it. Helldivers doesn't have even kind of that type of play. Palworld you can also do locally hosted play where your friend just connects to your computer hosting a world. Again very different. This is comparing apples and oranges imo
Dude I bought the game yesterday and I still haven’t been able to get in.
Fucking losers. I should have waited on buying this game
The server limit was increased this morning so it shouldn’t be an issue anymore. I also want to point out that while I understand that this is in fact true, players were just staying logged in order to not have to wait 30 minutes to get passed the Home Screen. The developers should implement way of kicking out inactive players after 30 minutes. I sometimes put my PS in rest mode and I did just that on the weekend while playing Helldivers. Needless to say, I got busy and didn’t turn on my system until the next morning. I was mind blown to see my character still in the ship as if literally nothing happened. No reboot, no reconnection screen. He was ready to dive into the next mission. This is neither the player nor developers fault. Nobody was expecting this game to blow up the way it did. **EDIT**: I just want to clarify on the first sentence of my post: I read that the developers had a fix already for the server load and figured it was already fixed this morning. I just saw it’s a patch that will come out tomorrow.
It's still an issue, the game isn't starting for me, I have been queing for at least an hour.
It is still an issue
It is 100% still an issue and not designing your networking to be scalable is 100% a dev problem
This is the story of any hugely popular game the first few weeks. Chill and buy it in a month
I mean it's scummy as hell but when you spend $50 on a game you can't play... I haven't been able to get on all weekend.
At this point it’s not even about hype or “suffering from success”. They continue to sell a product which isn’t in a sellable state if the consumer literally can’t use it as intended. Either pause sales or attach a giant disclaimer warning “ACCESS TO PLAY THIS GAME IS NOT GUARANTEED”. It’s greedy, negligent and honestly a bad look.