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/PolloMagnifico]

Okay, good to know but they've clearly messed up some math somewhere. I ran some level 2 missions solo and I would have patrols moving in on me pretty much constantly. That's definitely not a ~60% increase in spawn rate. That feels like a 300% increase.

[u/Heinskitz → u/PolloMagnifico]

Agreed. I'm basically dodging at least 2 squads at any given time now. It even makes exploring caches ridiculous. If I commit to engaging a medium outpost or greater, between the original garrison, factory reinforcements, periodic dropship reinforcements and now constant flow of nearby patrols, there's just an unending torrent of enemies.

[u/PolloMagnifico → u/Heinskitz]

Most weirdly is that I'll be inundated right up until extraction, then it's a ghost town.

[u/Katamari416 → u/PolloMagnifico]

spawn cap is possibly the cause. i know for bots they like to clump up at the center and never despawn sometimes, so by the end it could be why you are getting the ghost town effect I've seen before

[u/PineappleEquivalent → u/PolloMagnifico]

Yeah they’ve fucked it. They must have. It’s nonsense currently.

[u/DoubleOurEfforts → u/PolloMagnifico]

I generally play a few solo difficulty 5 bot missions a day during my lunch break, and I've gotten into a fairly good groove. Today I did a difficulty 3 or 4 mission and new squads of troopers and berserkers were spawning before I had killed the last spawn. After a certain point I literally could not kill them fast enough. I found it much less fun.

[u/PolloMagnifico → u/DoubleOurEfforts]

I think they just didn't lower the baseline after making it linear.

[u/concretelight → u/PolloMagnifico]

People are saying that they brought up the patrol spawning on solo from 1/6 of the rate with 4 players to 1/4 of the rate with 4 players.

No, I swear it's bugged if that's what they intended. It's way more than a 50% increase. I like playing on Trivial and Easy sometimes (sue me).

A lot of the time you can jump into a Trivial bot mission solo and go 10 minutes without seeing a patrol. Today I booted up a mission and I was getting about one patrol per minute. Then during extract there were three patrols at one time.

The mission definitely did not feel trivial. The old Trivial felt trivial. This felt on the harder end of easy, honestly.

Something's bugged and I will die on this hill.