The community manager for Helldivers 2 found herself in an unexpected predicament recently when she was temporarily blocked from Discord, mistakenly flagged as a bot.
Taking to Twitter, Katherine Baskin reached out to Discord support to resolve the issue, explaining that the overwhelming success of the multiplayer shooter had inundated her with hundreds of direct messages daily from players seeking assistance. Despite her efforts to respond promptly, her rapid replies triggered Discord’s bot detection system, resulting in her account being disabled.
“I just got locked out of my account because of ‘sending too many DMs too fast’,” she lamented in a tweet. “The Helldivers 2 server has over 400k people in it and I get 100s of DMs a day about game support, moderation, etc.. can I get my account reenabled pls? sent in a ticket too.”
Following initial silence from Discord, Baskin persisted, urging them, “Come on, I have work to do.” Johan Pilestedt, the creative director of Helldivers 2, also joined in to inform players of the situation and add pressure on Discord to address the matter promptly. “Also, total silence from Discord support – which is a different strategy to what we use for [developer] Arrowhead Game Studios and Helldivers 2.”
Fortunately, Baskin’s account was reinstated within less than 48 hours of the incident, and she wasted no time in announcing her return, declaring, “I’m BACK and ready to liberate some automaton SCUM.”
Helldivers 2 has encountered challenges in keeping up with the game’s immense popularity since its recent launch. Surpassing major PlayStation Studio launches on Steam in terms of concurrent players, Arrowhead Game Studios initiated an emergency hiring campaign to cope with the overwhelming demand.
Despite the team’s efforts, staff members reportedly felt “completely exhausted” but satisfied with the bustling first week. A recent patch increased the server limit to 700,000 ahead of an anticipated weekend surge, although developers acknowledge that this will only marginally improve wait times rather than entirely eliminating them.
