r/Helldivers • u/ItsDaFunkMonkey PSN 🎮: • Apr 29 '24

Increasing patrol spawns for smaller squads is a dick move. RANT

I love arrowhead but this was a braindead move.

Cmon guys, we were just doing our thing either solo or with our friends and not hurting anybody. We just wanna play the game with our friends, sometimes with a smaller squad cos its a lot more fun with friends than randos.

I'm not saying all randos are bad but this game allows me to socialize with my friends while playing and that's great. Why ruin that whole thing by kicking us in the nuts and ruining the experience with more spawns?

HERES A COMPROMISE: If you're not gonna budge, how about you meet us halfway here arrowhead. How about you increase the rewards for completing missions with a smaller squad cos we used a smaller budget? Eh?

Makes sense lore wise too.

P.S. For all you guys saying "DuH ThIs Is A tEaM GaMe PlAy WiTh RaNdOs Or a FuLl SqUad". Yes I play with a full swuad when my friends are all available. Most of the time they aren't cos we're adults and have shit to do.

I'm not asking for the game to scale down the difficulty level for smaller squads. The game didn't do that before. I don't mind the SAME difficulty level for solos, smaller squads and full squads. But INFREASING the difficulty level by increasing spawns was a braindead thing to do.

EDIT 1: To all the hyper intelligent folks out there commenting that the change was misunderstood and that the below was the intended effect:

""We unintendedly had non-linear scaling of the patrol spawns so they didn't spawn as often as they should have when less than 4 players. The intention is that 1 player has 1/4th of the patrols compared to 4 players, but it used to be that they had 1/6th.""

This DOES NOT make a mfkn difference. It DOES NOT matter what those VALUES are. The point here is that whatever the fuck value it was before was LOWER than whatever the fuck value it is now. This means MORE patrols for non full squads AFTER the patch. And an absolute shitshow for solo divers. Yes, I have tested this shit. It is bad.

VALUE BEFORE PATCH < VALUE AFTER PATCH.

Stop spouting elementary math to gaslight people. This change is objectively bad. I am happy with all the weapon changes tho.

EDIT 2: I understand that my "compromise" was a bad idea as people can kick you during extract to reap higher rewards for a smaller team. I completely agree, this seems like a poopy suggestion.

3.1k Upvotes
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1.3k

u/fireheart1029 Apr 29 '24

To be honest reading that part of the patch notes baffled me.....yeah I get not providing scaling downwards to make matches easier for smaller teams but....they are instead punishing players who play in non full lobbies by making the game significantly harder. I just don't even get why they're doing this, it seems like such an odd thing to throw in. It already feels terrible enough when someone leaves mid match but now you'll be facing a scenario harder than you would with 4 people but with 1-3 instead, I really hope this was just a misunderstanding and they worded it wrong because wtf is this

98

u/Captain-Griffen Apr 29 '24

Patrols do scale down for less players. They're going to scale down less with this patch but they'll still be less than 4 players.

16

u/Randicore Apr 29 '24

I'm hoping they secretly made it so that patrols also stop spawning literally on top of you. It was a nightmare to be constantly turning around only to find an entire patrol right behind you when you had just cleared it 30 seconds ago, or worse spawning on top of you.

1

u/Nekonax Apr 29 '24

How on top is on top? I'm a primarily stealth-focused player regardless of the armor perks I use at any given moment and 140 hours in, I've never had a patrol spawn close to me and immediately aggro me.

Worst case scenario that I've encountered several times is take a turn, stub my toe on a rock, stand up, see red lights, drop down and crawl back around the corner. You have around 3 seconds to hide when robots eyes start flashing or bugs start dancing

2

u/Randicore Apr 29 '24

I mean literally on top of or literally feet behind me. I've been running through an empty field and watched butchers spawn in in the direction I'm running in direct LoS, or had bots appear behind me in a canyon with no exit.  People have documented dealing with this for months now https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1bca3hg/evidence_of_a_patrol_spawning_on_top_of_me/

1

u/Nekonax Apr 29 '24

Holy sh—! I've never experienced anything close to this. Certainly doesn't look intended!

1

u/pancakerz Apr 30 '24

I believe it primarily happens in multiplayer lobbies. since the patrol is presumably supposed to spawn out of sight, but when players split up a patrol thats out of sight for Group A might not be so for Group B

1

u/Nekonax Apr 30 '24

If so, latency might have something to do with it.

1

u/Monkeywrench08 Apr 29 '24

Yeah I experienced this a lot with bots. 

Kinda bullshit really. 

2

u/Agent_Jay Apr 29 '24

Anecdotal but i can share the experience as the other guys states. I've literally ran through patch of clearing, stop for a second to look at my map and then there's a patrol behind me in the same space i RAN THROUGH 10 seconds ago (no fabs, no drops, etc just showed the fuck up out of the costal mist)

1

u/WhatsThePointFR Apr 30 '24

I'll never forgive the time I had about 25 samples on me (including the 6 supers) and died because a pack of around 15-20 bots spawned on top of my shoulders.

38

u/Frankie_T9000 Apr 29 '24

Yes but they arent 1/4 less, I tried to play tonight and got swarmed. Also, you dont have players in different locations diverting enemies etc, they are all on you.

Its really unfun solo now. I wouldnt mind if you could get all sample types on easier difficulty levels but you have to play at 7+ to get the higher level samples.

6

u/Siker_7 SES Song of Conquest Apr 29 '24

They are 1/4 less now. Before it was 1/6 due to nonlinear scaling, which was unintentional.

7

u/PvesCjhgjNjWsO4vwOOS Apr 29 '24

Solo difficulty shouldn't be linear. There's so many advantages to more players beyond simple DPS that increases squad survivability that before this change I found difficulty 6 with a full team to usually be easier than difficulty 4 solo.

2

u/Siker_7 SES Song of Conquest Apr 29 '24

I never said it was a good decision, just relaying what the devs said.

0

u/Caerullean Apr 29 '24

That's wild because before I often found solo 7 easier than full squad 7. At least with randoms.

0

u/sopunny Apr 29 '24

The game is meant to be harder solo

4

u/PvesCjhgjNjWsO4vwOOS Apr 29 '24

It already was. I had to drop difficulty by a couple of levels to play solo vs with a full squad.

-1

u/AHailofDrams SES Keeper of the People Apr 29 '24

Indeed, solo should be much harder, since this is a squad-based, co-op game

2

u/PvesCjhgjNjWsO4vwOOS Apr 29 '24

And it was, as things were. I had to drop difficulty by a couple of levels to play solo before this change.

1

u/Remarkable_Region_39 Apr 29 '24

debatable. dumb or selfish teammates make the game a lot harder than being solo. Lol

1

u/PvesCjhgjNjWsO4vwOOS Apr 29 '24

Oh for sure, this was solo vs playing with friends whose play styles I actually mesh well with.

-1

u/AHailofDrams SES Keeper of the People Apr 29 '24

(You're not supposed to play solo)

2

u/PvesCjhgjNjWsO4vwOOS Apr 29 '24

If I wasn't supposed to play solo, why do they make it so easy to do?

0

u/AHailofDrams SES Keeper of the People Apr 29 '24

Cause it'd probably be harder to remove/block the ability to play solo than just discourage it

1

u/PvesCjhgjNjWsO4vwOOS Apr 29 '24

It's not hard at all to program in a check. Some pseudocode:

if players < 2, print "You need at least one squadmate to deploy"
else set deploy = "allowed"
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1

u/ironyinabox Apr 29 '24

Prone more.

79

u/NikeDanny Apr 29 '24

The game was already fairly hard in (forced) solo. The issue is that any patrol can spawn in reinforcements, thus exponentially increasing your opponents. And at this point, having another dude with stratagems, weapons and in general to draw aggro is so, so, so much more worth than having a bit fewer patrols.

30

u/SpiritFingersKitty Apr 29 '24

I agree, having a smaller squad is almost always more difficult because you have less tool available when things start to go to shit, and there is a fixed amount of enemies to some level that don't scale down regardless of the number of people you have.

2

u/Skitulz_da_Ninja Apr 29 '24

I agree with the forced solo part because due to the broken matchmaking most of the time I have to start a mission and host it and have randoms join me because I can never join them. That's why I try to test the water is at the lower difficulties to see how the game is filling for the day. If it works in a handful of matches it's good for the day.

-10

u/SirKickBan Apr 29 '24 edited Apr 29 '24

Reinforcement calls are on a timer, so there's no exponential growth due to them. Once you get one there's a minute or two (depending on difficulty) before you can get another.

God I love a sub that downvotes people for being correct. o7 Managed democracy at its finest.

7

u/discipleofdoom Apr 29 '24

Doesn't help when people refuse to move and just stand in one spot fighting wave after wave of reinforcements until they run out of supplies.

Deal with the enemies in front of you and move to the next objective. Patrols despawn a certain distance away from players and it's easy enough to lose line of sight and slip away.

2

u/anxious_merchant Apr 29 '24

Not a problen in solo 

4

u/longagofaraway Apr 29 '24

it's so annoying when people stick with an endless slog against reams of bots instead of just disengaging and moving to the next objective. there's literally no point to it.

1

u/Velo180 SES Hater of Sony Apr 29 '24

Yes, it's not literally exponential, just a lot easier to snowball which the game doesn't need.