New Helldivers 2 patch kicks AFK queue dodgers, but one of its worst bugs still remains

What you need to know

• Helldivers 2 has been afflicted with severe server capacity issues this past week, resulting in players often having to wait in long queues before they can log into the game.
• Many have tried to queue dodge by going AFK on their ship whenever they’re not playing, taking up server space an active player could be using.
• A new update for Helldivers 2 has fixed this issue by implementing a system that kicks idle players back to the title screen after 15 minutes.
• The patch also fixes a number of different glitches and crashes, though it doesn’t fix the frustrating bug that’s causing armor values to not work properly and making medium and heavy armor useless.

After developer Arrowhead Game Studios released an update for Helldivers 2 earlier this week that improved the game’s backend server performance and squashed several of its most significant bugs, it’s now followed it up with a second patch that continues to shore up the co-op shooter’s stability while also addressing AFK players idling on their ship to avoid queues.

Helldivers 2 has been plagued with severe server capacity issues for the past week, owing to the game’s surprising rapid player count growth taking Arrowhead by surprise. Though the studio has been working around the clock to resolve the problem by expanding its servers, the number of cadets dropping into the game to defend Super Earth during peak hours also grows daily. On Tuesday night, the game reached a record-high concurrent player count of 457,649 on Steam alone according to SteamDB, which makes it the 20th most-played Steam game of all time.

In an effort to get around the resulting login queue, many players have been leaving Helldivers 2 open and going AFK so that they don’t have to wait again later — and taking up space an online player could be using, as a consequence. Arrowhead said it was readying the boot to take care of this problem on Monday, and after today’s update, AFK players will now get a kick back to the title screen after 15 minutes of idling.

It’s great to see Arrowhead finally take care of this — there’s a better way to skip the Helldivers 2 queue, anyway — and it’s good that lots of crashes and glitches were fixed with the update, too (check the full patch notes in the section below for more details). It is, however, disappointing to see that one of the game’s worst bugs is still unresolved.