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Over the course of the weekend, Arrowhead Game Studios decided to offer up a 50% bonus XP weekend for Helldivers 2. This bonus XP was meant to serve as an apology for the ever ongoing server issues plaguing the surprise hit of a game. Unfortunately, issues with server capacity not being able to meet player demand were never fixed and, for a lot of people, it has been impossible for many to even log into the game let alone playing to earn the bonus experience.
At the time of the 50% bonus XP weekend being announced, Helldivers 2 was on its way to a new peak concurrent player count. It had hit 258,433 concurrent players in the late afternoon hours of Friday, February 16. Over the weekend, that peak skyrocketed to 386,612 concurrent players just on Steam alone. If we assume there are at least the same number of players on PlayStation 5, you're looking at maybe 775,000 people trying to play Helldivers 2 at once at peak hours.
The servers failed to keep up.
This seems to have been an expected outcome though. Communications across the Helldivers 2 social channels indicated that while they felt they lessened the impact of login and server issues, they were never fully fixed. The login servers have been heavily impacted by players of the game on both PC and PlayStation 5. At least on PC, if you fail to connect to the login servers, you could end up staring at a black screen.
Even for those that were able to log into the game, crashes were experienced due to unstable clients and unstable servers. This resulted in lost game time and lost progress, not to mention that those players who crashed or were disconnected then had to try to log back in. Matchmaking has also not worked well, if at all, over the past several days. This means that players who have managed to log in and not crash were unable to find other randoms to play with. In short: The servers have been terrible throughout the entirety of this bonus XP weekend.
The last update from the Helldivers 2 team came almost a full day ago on Saturday afternoon. They say that they are still "experiencing capacity issues" despite their "best efforts to increase server capacity." They say that they are still working on the issues and "hope to have a fix in place as soon as possible."
It maybe wasn't the best idea to host a bonus XP weekend while the game and its servers were not fully operational ahead of time. Many players have been completely unable to play during this "apology" weekend. With no clear indication on when these server issues will be fully addressed, I wouldn't be surprised to hear an announcement of another bonus XP weekend in the near future. Hopefully that will happen after full fixes are in place for servers and rewards not being granted. Honestly, just being to log in and play at all without issue would probably be enough for most players.
