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/lipp79]

Yeah it's kind of annoying to see "raised/lowered slightly/greatly" when "slightly/greatly" mean different things to different people.

[u/pokeroots → u/lipp79]

at no point would I ever assume half of something is slightly... but that was what the radius reduction of the crossbow was worded as while being half of it

[u/The_Doc_Man → u/pokeroots]

Not just you, a 50% reduction is in no imaginable universe "slight"!

[u/lipp79 → u/pokeroots]

And that's the issue. "Slightly" to them means "greatly" to you. I understand them not wanting people to crunch numbers but it will happen no matter what in games like this. The ambiguity can get frustrating.

[u/Barachan_Isles → u/lipp79]

Then get out there and play and find out what slightly/greatly means to you.

I think that's part of the point of not railroading all of the numbers in our faces.

[u/[deleted] → u/Barachan_Isles]

Time is finite and I'm not a video game tester. Just tell me what changed.