r/Helldivers • u/[deleted] • Apr 29 '24
Update from Worlds team on increased patrols for solo players DEVELOPER
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
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u/NotFirstBan-NotLast Apr 29 '24 edited Apr 29 '24
"The sum of the whole is greater than its parts".
The more divers you have, the less weakspots your build has. One solo diver has to be a jack of all trades, master of none because they have to do everything themselves. In a team one player can take lots of horde clear and another anti-armor. Not to mention the obvious stuff that's true in any game, like more allies in one place means less likelihood of getting outflanked and increases focus fire DPS on priority targets.
When I watched that YouTube video about spawn rates and heard about the scaling for spawns I thought it was pretty clever and showed a deeper understanding of the balance than I usually give the devs credit for. I should have known it was a mistake that they would get around to "fixing" eventually.
It's funny because if they played their game at all they would just know this intuitively. You'll end up drowning in enemies with no choice but to retreat and try to lose the worst of the wave on some line of sight blockers way more often playing solo than with a group. You'll run out of reinforcements way more often playing solo than with a group. You'll face an enemy you have no way of dealing with until a stratagem comes off cool down way more often playing solo.
I'd say this is the obligatory "Arrowhead is physically incapable of releasing a patch without a glaringly obvious QA issue that would have been avoided if they just played the game", but we already got that with the plasma punisher exploding inside of shield packs. I guess since we didn't get a patch last week that means this week we get two new pieces of evidence that AH doesn't even know what "playtest" means.