I didn't realize ppl were just squatting on connections
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Connection was so flakey that if people were able to get in they'd just stay in. They created connection problems to avoid connection problems.
We've been having to have one of us join, Sometimes It takes up to an hour and a half for that one person to get in, And then we're all able to join off that one person. But man it's kind of sucked. I have like a very small window to play video games after I get the kiddo down for bed. And like four nights in a row it got to the point where I wouldn't have had time to even do a 12 minute mission from having to wait for it to connect.
It really sucks that Helldivers 2 is having an issue over too many connections. I know the devs are saying this is complicated, and it is, but they're not the only company that is serving a huge amount of users. This game has several questionable design decisions and this is just one of them. I hope it can be fixed because I was really looking forward to playing
Designing for a huge amount of users costs money and expertise, so more money, and not even their most optimistic predictions included this many players. If they hadn't made it big, that money would've been wasted. Which games are going to go viral is just insanely hard to predict.
I mean letting people play their coop game if their servers are having issues is free. The game itself is P2P anyway.
I wonder what's the scalability issue. I've never seen a system that can't be fixed by throwing more horizontally scalable resources at it.
Given that when the servers are overloaded you don't get rewards: They probably have a centralized database or some other centralization issue.
You can add to a cluster all you want but if you're using a SQL monolith you'll get locks.
If you only have 100k concurrent users you can probably get away with it.
At 450k they're running into gridlock
Yeha, that's what I can't imagine. What part of their data architecture can't be sharded?
user accounts? sessions? cache keys? profiles? graphical assets?
This isn't a highly transactional bank with strong transactional guarantes.
Would be pretty cool if they explained the issue after fixing it.
I mean it's not a bank in that it doesn't have all the audit requirements etc but it's sorta a bank in that it's keeping track of transactions and state for every player every time a mission completes, which is a transaction that they really don't want to go wrong.
And at a guess that code is held together with spit and baling wire.
Napkin math: That centralized transactional account updates every time there's an end mission payout and with 400k concurrent players at 4 players per mission, say average 20 minute length (some missions 2 min some 40) that's thousands of transactions per minute.
Totally doable load for even a modest central server I'd think... Unless you've got optimization issues. Which I'd argue a central db that doesn't shard out at scale is an optimization issue.
Rare's Sea of Thieves has/had similar issues. They run all their game instance servers on Azure (from some deep divers looking at IPs the game communicates with) and can spin up/down as many as needed to handle as many players as needed (from some change logs a year or two ago).
That said, during times of especially high player counts like right after an update drops, there's often issues when you initially launch the game and it tries to log you in. Gold payouts can also be delayed by a number of hours, but they've got some sort of queuing system in place so you don't need to stay signed in until they show up. You can sign out and they can somehow apply while you aren't playing.
It's just a problem caused by going online only to protect their cash shop. Helldivers 1 never needed it to play by yourself or with friends.
Too many games release as a GaAs when it doesn't need to be.
I wonder how smart the system is. People who are selfish enough to squat will get around the limitations any way possible, whether that's a rubber band on a joystick or a macro.
Unless the AFK timer can account for those situations, then you're potentially just hurting the dude who waited all day like everyone else, but had to get up and take a fat shit, or may have sat in the ship too long, not realizing theyd made it in since they were playing something else on the side.
People are saying that the rubber band on joystick trick doesn't work, at least. So they at least are checking for changes to input events.
Glad to hear! I'm all for an AFK kicker, but an unintelligent AFK kicker practically may as well not exist for its intended purpose and may catch grey area as collateral
but had to get up and take a fat shit
It's a 15 minute timer, just wipe quicker FFS.
You're blessed to have strong bowels and normal poops, take a moment to enjoy your intestinal privilege
Damn, I'll check my privilege...
Glad to see them making changes. This game is fun as hell, but running into issues getting in sucks bad. Especially when you're in a squad and someone's game drops and they can't join again for another hour.