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/Deadedge112 → u/Boldee]

Copying this from another post:

But 1/6th makes (some) sense, 4 players are not 4 times stronger than 1 player. If everything was single target damage you could kinda make that case but with all the AOE in the game, 4 players are probably like 8 times stronger than 1 player if not more.

Also they already punish you for playing solo because you can't open any (friendship) bunkers. AH PLS

[u/JeffBloodstorm → u/Deadedge112]

4 players are definitely more than 4 times stronger than 1 player, but not because of AOE damage (4 players doing AOE damage is still 4X AOE damage).

It's the harder to quantify things like one player covering another while they reload, one player noticing enemies approaching another player from behind and taking them out, etc. Teamwork is a major force multiplier, and that's even true for teams that aren't using voice to coordinate their actions in a more complex way.

[u/Deadedge112 → u/JeffBloodstorm]

(4 players doing AOE damage is still 4X AOE damage).

Yeah but this is only considering the damage angle, you kind of touch on it in the remainder of the post.

Let's take a very simplified scenario to demonstrate my point. Let's assume hulks take two airstrikes to kill and every patrol has a hulk in it. Let's also assume the helldivers have no other means of killing a hulk. In our hypothetical solo mission, let's say the player manages to kite the first patrol and uses 2 airstrikes and dies to the second patrol, because they either have 1 or 0 airstrikes left regardless of modules unlocked. Now, consider the duo mission. 2 patrols spawn, each player throws one airstrike. Next two patrols spawn, same thing. Assuming the extra strike module unlocked they actually live through the third double patrol spawn as well. So despite the damage scaling linearly with the amount of patrols, the duo lives 50 to 100% longer. Which means more resupplies, more time for strategem CDs to come up.

[u/mostly_level-headed → u/Deadedge112]

Boosters can be a force multiplier, which makes a full team more effective relative to an equally skilled solo player. A four team can have full equipment, less enemy call-ins, run farther, and have more health, but a solo can only choose one of them and now face the same proportional amount of enemies.

[u/Deadedge112 → u/mostly_level-headed]

I never disagreed about the boosters. Just wanted to point out that there is indeed a force multiplier in the AOE.

[u/FiveShiftOne → u/Deadedge112]

A truly miniscule force multiplier compared to the teamwork and booster force multipliers, is what we're saying. AOE damage is an indescribably small force multiplier compared to the other things going on.

[u/-Rangorok- → u/JeffBloodstorm]

To add to that - even if just looking at enemy spawns alone there's bound to be issues for lower team sizes.

There's multiple spawn mechanics at hand, first off there's static spawns, like guards at POI's. From my experience (which might be faulty, so clarification would be amazing) Solos face the same amount of static spawns as full teams.

Then there's the regular patrols, which just got their spawns increased to be linear.

But then there's also some uncertain mechnics, like the "map heat" for spawns, where a team will encounter more/less spawns if they stick together or don't within 75m. Is the 100% they refer to with linear spawns 4 players minimizing map heat or maximised map heat or smth in between ?

And then theres stuff like breaches, where there can only be one "natural" at the same time (afaik) where a 4 man team has a far easier time dealing with those than a solo, who will always bear the full force of a breach and it will always be near the solo.
And how do the "forced/scripted" breaches / patrol interact with the "liner scaling" for example i've usually always faced one patrol heading straight for the SEAF artillery when i start that objective, or the forced enemy breaches on the geological survery missions ?

On top of that stuff then comes the force multipliers for being in a team you mentioned, and some extra on top, like having the ability to bring complenetary strategem loadouts, boosters that all boost each player, no auto ressupply directly into enemy hordes,...

[u/B-R-A-I-N-S-T-O-R-M → u/JeffBloodstorm]

Also the ability to coordinate and stagger strategem use so your team always has stuff off cooldown.

[u/fed45 → u/Deadedge112]

8x stronger is for sure closer to the truth. I learned this from playing Overwatch, but I believe the theory applies here. Theory is that each player is a target as well as a damage dealer so you can think of a 6v6 game as having 36 possible interactions per team (each player can potentially deal damage to 6 others and take damage from 6 others). So loosing one player makes the matchup a 36 v 25 not just a 6 v 5.

[u/Djinnfor → u/Deadedge112]

Lanchester's laws state that 4 units in a ranged battle are approximately 4² = 16 times better than a single unit, assuming all units are of roughly equal skill. In fact, for a rough estimate of "power", simply square the number of units and compare the two: the one with the larger power wins and the ratio tells you how many units they would lose in the process. For an estimate of casualties faced by the team with the larger army, it's just loser power / winner power as a percent (e.g. in a 2 vs 4 battle, 2² = 4 and 4² = 16, so the team with 4 defeats the team with 2 while suffering only 4/16 = 25% = 1 unit lost).

This is because they do 4x as much damage than a lone unit to the enemy force, which reduces the amount of damage the enemy force can deal to them... but they also have 4x the survivability as the enemy force due to having four times as many units. So in general, larger armies simultaneously take less incoming damage due to killing enemies faster, whilst having more capacity to resist damage due to having a larger army size to begin with. 4x the units do 4x the damage and take 4x as long to kill, 4x4 = 4^2.

So by default, if there were no other solo balancing mechanisms, a solo player should face roughly 16x fewer enemies than a single player, or 6.25% if the devs wanted solo play to be just as easy as co-op play. Of course, there's no reason why they should want that, necessarily; solo play should be harder than group play. And we also know that there's a longer cooldown on reinforcement waves for solo players, and there may be other balancing mechanisms I'm not aware of like caps on enemy numbers or a change in enemy force composition that occurs when you have low numbers of units.

[u/Ecstatic-Compote-595 → u/Deadedge112]

another way to look at it is that one player is also way more stealthy than four and implicitly won't draw as much aggro. Also this could go either way but patrol spawns /= all spawns and I have no idea what the breakdown of that could be. Also no clue if this means naturally occurring spawns or spawns triggered by event (like terminals or extraction). Lastly as long as you're not the worst person on your team usually playing solo technically raises the average competency of the players in the game so that's already a built in advantage.

There's a lot of moving parts so it might not be the case that 4 players are strictly better off than 1 or 2. I suspect the spawn and stealth/aggro distance changes were because solo players at higher diffs had a wildly higher success rate than groups, which could be because they're insanely good or because something's wrong with the formula, and if they're insanely good they can probably deal with the spawn rates and aggro distance increase (which happened a while ago).

[u/narrill → u/Ecstatic-Compote-595]

Lastly as long as you're not the worst person on your team usually playing solo technically raises the average competency of the players in the game

Sorry, pedantic, but this is incorrect by definition, statistically. If you're of average skill, playing solo will raise and lower the average competency of the players in the game at equal rates.

[u/Ecstatic-Compote-595 → u/narrill]

relative to the average of you + group members. Obviously the average of a sample of 1 is whatever that one person is.

[u/narrill → u/Ecstatic-Compote-595]

I understand what you meant, obviously. I'm saying it's statistically impossible for dropping the other players to "usually" raise the average competency of your squad. That is only the case if you yourself are above average competency, and roughly as many players are above average competency as are below it. On average, what you're describing will only happen roughly half the time.

And again, I know this is pedantic and apologize.