When a house becomes too small for your family, the obvious solution is moving to a bigger house. The same logic should apply to online games and their servers, except it doesn’t and Arrowhead Game Studios’ CEO just explained why.
While the internet’s armchair developers are quick to call out companies for being cheap and cutting costs by not paying to increase server capacity, Johan Pilested is proving otherwise.
In a reply to a fan’s query to his tweet ahead of Helldivers 2‘s second weekend where he had hoped for the best – the game’s servers still couldn’t hold up, by the way – he explained why spending money for additional server capacity isn’t solving anything.
According to Pilestedt, the problem isn’t “buying more servers” but “a matter of labour”, adding that the development team is starting to hit “some real limits” on its backend code.
Pilestedt didn’t go into detail about the problems Helldivers 2‘s backend code is facing, but many speculate it’s because it isn’t designed to support such a huge amount of players so soon. Unfortunately, this leads to an entirely different conversation. Is Helldivers 2 designed in a way that changing certain functions and data handling methods isn’t enough to let its servers call better? If so, is the way Helldivers 2 is designed the real bottleneck?
Regardless of the actual problem, it could take anywhere between a couple of days to weeks if not months for Arrowhead to resolve, depending on how fast it can get to the bottom of the issue.
Unfortunately, given most player’s relative inexperience in these matters, we shouldn’t give this too much thought.
What’s important is Arrowhead is aware of the ongoing issues and working hard on solving them. Even better is that PlayStation is helping out.
With Arrowhead enlisting more help for the cause, Helldivers 2‘s problems could be a thing of the past sooner rather than later.
For now, Arrowhead is applying temporary solutions such as limiting server capacity to try and make sure that as many people can have fun fighting for liberty and spreading democracy without compromising others.
