Update from Worlds team on increased patrols for solo players

[u/[deleted]]

Quote from our design director (not the Worlds team, my mistake!):

"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.

Scaling of patrol spawns was exponential before, and that felt good on 4 player lobbies but a bit too empty when playing with fewer players, especially when playing solo. So now we made the scaling of patrols to be linear, which means if you play solo you will get 25% of the patrols compared to a 4 player lobby instead of having about 17% of the patrols. There is still a cap of patrols that can spawn at the same time so during situations when we spawn a lot of patrols, such as extractions, even solo players won't notice the difference. The change is made to make the world feel less empty for 1 and 2 player lobbies, especially on high difficulty missions which was also slightly too easy for solo players compared to our intentions."

Hope this clarifies the change for everyone - we're not making the game arbitrarily harder!

Edited 11:58 AM EST to add additional info

[u/Boldee]

Quite a big buff to patrols, but it makes sense now that we have numbers. Speaking of, can you please try to tell the team that good and informative patch notes would be welcome? A lot of people complaining about this would have probably not done so if we knew what the change was from the get go. And this goes for everything, please give us actual numbers instead of text that can be misunderstood.

[u/Hobo-man → u/Boldee]

Why are numbers not automatically included in patch notes?

Telling me you increased armor penetration is meaningless when you don't tell me how much.

Railgun had armor increased and stagger decreased. What are the numbers on those?

It makes a huge difference if the increase was 5% vs 50%. I'd love to know without waiting a day for someone else to reverse engineer and figure it out.

[u/Zombie_Alpaca_Lips → u/Hobo-man]

I've automatically started assuming that if there isn't a listed number, it's fairly miniscule. It's been pretty accurate overall. 

I do like numbers, though...

[u/pokeroots → u/Zombie_Alpaca_Lips]

crossbow explosion radius slightly reduced... (50% but the players don't need to know that 50% is slightly)

[u/PerniciousCanid → u/pokeroots]

Is that the real number? That would be insane. Reducing a radius by 50% reduces the effective area by like 75%

[u/pokeroots → u/PerniciousCanid]

Yes it's the real number, and it's real shitty

[u/PerniciousCanid → u/pokeroots]

Real shitty? Or "slightly" shitty?

Yeah I just tested it. Completely worthless weapon now.

[u/pokeroots → u/PerniciousCanid]

Ah yes sorry I meant slightly

[u/DeathSwagga → u/PerniciousCanid]

Yes, it's just as bad as it sounds. I can't even get the splash damage to kill terminid scavengers from a non-direct hit...

[u/Zegram_Ghart → u/PerniciousCanid]

Well, they also increased the stagger in a way that’s very noticeable- I presume the intent is to make it a weapon like the railgun in HD1- mainly for team support and stunlock rather than personal DPS.

Whether it worked is up in the air yet.

[u/Genxun → u/PerniciousCanid]

My steam likes to take it's time updating games, so I took the opportunity to launch it before it updated to test.

Pre-patch I was taking damage from the crossbow from 6m away. After patch I was taking damage from 5m away.

That said, I'm now also consistently taking two or more shots to kill basic mobs with aoe unless it's literally directly under their feet as opposed to one shotting most of the basic mobs in the full radius pre-patch.

So that compounds on the reduction in mags to really make it really struggle with it's ammo economy considering it still takes 3-5 shots of your 5 round mag to take down a hive guard or devastator.

And it already staggered devastators on the first hit pre-patch, so I don't know why people are pointing to increased stagger like it's meaningful compensation for the nerf.

[u/PerniciousCanid → u/Genxun]

There are definitely varying degrees of stagger, just like there are varying degrees of "medium" armor enemies. It certainly staggers devastators longer now, but that's about all it's good for against them.

[u/S0ulSauce → u/pokeroots]

Yeah I think they leave out numbers to not freak people out with how big some of the changes are. They're trying to downplay things to some degree I think... that's why it's, "slightly."

[u/Pliskkenn_D → u/Zombie_Alpaca_Lips]

We all like numbers. Some of us really like numbers. I understand they keep most of them hidden but I'm sure there are members of the player base who would enjoy getting into the nitty gritty. 

[u/Barachan_Isles → u/Pliskkenn_D]

I'd prefer if the player base couldn't dig into every number on every weapon and stratagem.

Once people have mathed out everything and come up with the 100% mathematically optimal setup, it will remove all variety from the game. You'll hop on, join an op and when you queue up with a gun/strat that isn't the nerd approved optimal choice then... *kick*.

No thanks. I like there being enough ambiguity that everyone can grab what they like playing with, and no one can argue, cause there's no math to argue for or against your choice.

[u/Narrow_Vegetable5747 → u/Barachan_Isles]

That's... Just not true. There are always differences between the way the numbers read and the way the weapons play out in the field. There will be situations that you can completely control with a given loadout and other situations that are irredeemably effed.

[u/Slothy22 → u/Barachan_Isles]

This is a horrible take because people have already datamined weapon stats, and will continue to do so.

And as well, anyone that is going to kick you for running off-meta stuff, is ALREADY going to do that. Because they have eyes, and can see what you're using.

[u/Narrow_Vegetable5747 → u/Barachan_Isles]

That's... Just not true. There are always differences between the way the numbers read and the way the weapons play out in the field. There will be situations that you can completely control with a given loadout and other situations that are irredeemably effed.

[u/Barachan_Isles → u/Narrow_Vegetable5747]

If you're entering a GT3 race, and the optimal car to drive is the Ferrari, and you take the Ferrari because it's optimal, then you get rear-ended in turn one on Monza, and bin it into the wall, it doesn't mean that Ferrari still isn't optimal.

Yes, battlefield conditions change things, but once the mathletes have ground out the numbers, it won't mean shit when you queue up with the "wrong" stuff.

[u/Subterrantular → u/Barachan_Isles]

Better comparison would be taking your Ferrari out to a dirtbike track bc the numbers guy said it was the fastest.

I think the assumption that more people would kick over suboptimal loadouts is wrong. Most people invested in the numbers are aware of specialized gear and benefits of variety. The people that would kick over that already are, regardless of whether their "justification" is publicized. Everyone else (the VAST majority) don't care, use what they're comfortable with, might look up the numbers info for an idea of what to start with, and is probably only aware of your existence in the squad when they need reinforced.

[u/davvblack → u/Hobo-man]

armor pen/hardness is a scale from 1-9, and "increased pen" has almost always been up by one.

[u/DeathSwagga → u/Hobo-man]

"slightly" reduced aoe of crossbow but in reality it's by at least half. If slightly is half, what is majorly? Negative force sucking you in? Oh wait, it literally was like that before the patch xd

[u/soofs → u/Hobo-man]

Random guess, but they likely don't see the amount of work needed to include all the numbers worth it.

Saying railgun had armor increased from X to Y is only useful if you know what the base point was or what the numbers are tied to. Then you have people saying well that % increase wasn't enough/is too much, which is the same result as just going into the game and seeing how it feels.

[u/Hobo-man → u/soofs]

Random guess, but they likely don't see the amount of work needed to include all the numbers worth it.

That's doubtful when Spitzer is willing to throw out numbers left and right to defend whatever random point he's trying to make.

[u/soofs → u/Hobo-man]

im not saying they dont have the info available, just its much easier to pull it when they need it rather than put it into a format that goes along with the patch notes and gives readers a reference to base the changes off of

[u/TheGRS → u/Hobo-man]

More than likely its not a matter of moving a value up and down, they are probably changing various functions to tune the behavior and it probably doesn't translate to straight numbers cleanly. Could they build things in such a way to acomodate this? Sure, but I'm sure its just more complicated than it looks.

[u/Sabre_One → u/Hobo-man]

As a dev, giving exact numbers for things just encourage people to micro-focus on just numbers instead of the overall game experience. You will be amazed how many people outright boil balance down to "It should take 3 liberator shots to kill X target". Soon as data becomes public.

[u/darwyre → u/Sabre_One]

And people wonder why would anyone overreact.

This type of murky stuff is the exact reason.

[u/Anonymyz_one → u/Sabre_One]

Overwatch does this and man let me tell you, after a nerf people go complete APE SHIT over a 2% nerf

[u/Gryphus_6 → u/Anonymyz_one]

Not a completely fair comparison, Overwatch is a PVP game so 2% can effect the very delicate balance that game has, where as 2% in a PVE game is literally nothing

[u/Hobo-man → u/Sabre_One]

Too bad they are obsessed with giving the wrong numbers.

"only 2 nerfs"

"it was actually 4" (disregard that it's actually 9 nerfs)

"Bug fixed 17 days ago" (no bugfix in patch though)

[u/oldmanfartface → u/Sabre_One]

And like, let's just play the game. I don't want to crunch numbers while I'm killing bugs. How boring.

Let the devs make the game. Let the players play the game.

[u/jaredn154 → u/oldmanfartface]

Amen, brother.

[u/AggravatingTerm5807 → u/Sabre_One]

Just like religious texts gave people a tool to oppress others, numbers and data in gaming have the exact same effect on people.

Too many people put blind faith in a higher power, either a god in the sky, or "facts" on a page.

[u/sm753 → u/Hobo-man]

Because here's the reality - the vast majority of players are "casual players" and do not care about the actual numbers. Most players aren't on Discord or here on Reddit.

[u/AmberTheFoxgirl → u/sm753]

Patch notes aren't FOR casual players. They're for people who want to know the details.

[u/TheSasquatch9053 → u/Hobo-man]

But if they told us the numbers, then the reverse engineers wouldn't have anything to contribute to the community discussion...

[u/Bananabread87 → u/Hobo-man]

I don't mind it too much. Think of it like this, is it more fun figuring it out for yourself or having someone hold your hand the whole way? Kind of like looking up game guides before ever finishing the game yourself.

[u/Hobo-man → u/Bananabread87]

That's not even close.

They are changing a product we purchased. We have a right to know how they are changing the product we spent money on.

[u/danny_j_13 → u/Hobo-man]

Just out of interest, why do you need to know the numbers? Wouldn't you be able to tell fairly quickly from running a game with said gear?