HELLDIVERS™ 2: HELLDIVERS 2 – Failed to Connect to Lobby – Fix

You are unable to join your friend’s game to spread democracy across the galaxy ! What do you do ?

Welcome to this quick little guide on how to fix the “Failed to connect to lobby” error that you might find when trying to join your friends or any other game. This is a really obscure problem that I struggled with for a while to fix. Along with the help of my friends we were able to pinpoint the problem. Let’s get to it.

Try out these steps before continuing with the guide for in case the problem isn’t as complex as it might seem:

• Restart HELLDIVERS 2.
• Restart your computer.
• Restart your WiFi router.
• Reset Network completely. (Settings > Network & Internet > Network Reset (Close all programs, leave Voice channels and let the computer do its thing when it tells you it’ll restart in 5 or so minutes))
• Disable VPN.
• Toggle Crossplay in game settings. (Will use less bandwidth and find a game faster)
• Disable Firewall.
• Verify integrity of game files.
• ABSOLUTE worst case would be to reinstall the game.

If these steps still didn’t work, continue on with the guide.

Once you press ESC and head over to Options > Gameplay, you’ll see an option to toggle Crossplay.
Turn it off. Unless your friends are on other platforms, feel free to skip this step. Toggling Matchmaking Privacy to Public would also help. Also apparently the Steam friends aren’t the same as your in game HELLDIVERS friends. Under the “Social” tab there should be a thing where you can generate a friend code and just send it off to whoever via Steam, Discord or SMS.

Now. If this still doesn’t work, it’s time to head on over to the Network and Sharing Center on your Windows 10 or 11 Computer.

And there you have it. You should be able to join your friends now and Spread Democracy till your heart’s content.

Although I do not recommend turning off IPv6 capabilities under your adapter settings since it may cause certain Windows programs to not work correctly or to stop working entirely. So if there are any weird things happening, just toggle that setting back on and everything should be working fine.

Like I said, this is an incredibly obscure problem and I’m making this guide to hopefully help future HELLDIVERS who might have the same problem as me. Funnily enough, long before I had HELLDIVERS 2 I had the same problem in No Man’s Sky. I’d board the Anomaly and there won’t be any players at all. After toggling this setting people showed up and could join my session no problem.

Thank you to all my friends for helping me solve this problem.

This was my very first guide so I hope it helps and it looks alright. If there are any questions or problems, feel free to leave them in the comments below, I’ll try my best to answer all of them.

Let’s Spread Democarcy !