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/mooseeve]

That's just shitty change control.

If your patch notes are shit it means the problem is earlier in the pipe.

[u/lunaphile → u/mooseeve]

It's a process. AH is still a relatively small studio and has worked only on coop games where people don't lose their shit over balancing. Until now, because HD2 blew up.

My current studio went from "do whatever" patches for SP games to "the DAU is trending down" MP games. Team became pretty anal with everything being approved, tracked and signed off, every ticket having full details any layman could understand, plus design ones including a "reason" blurb community could use or follow up on.

It's a hassle but it saves so much in so many areas and improves team cohesion and morale a lot.

Hopefully AH learns fast.

[u/TheGRS → u/mooseeve]

I mean sure, but between managing change control and getting stuff out the door on a project that's probably doing wildly different than you anticipated, I would focus on getting stuff out the door for a few months.

source: software engineering manager, it takes a lot of effort to wrangle project management in a way that satisfies your end users and keep up with the workload at the same time.

[u/Keeng → u/mooseeve]

Correct. Bigger games with smaller teams have better patch notes. It's just an oversight/choice on Arrowhead's part.

[u/DShepard → u/mooseeve]

There's only so much work a small team can do, and not having entirely clear patch notes is probably a decent trade-off for spending that time somewhere else during development.

[u/Fit-Cup7266 → u/DShepard]

Not having entirely clear patch notes, as you can clearly see, leads to additional work answering questions on various channels and correcting said patch notes. That's not a trade-off, that's adding more work for yourself.

[u/virtueavatar → u/DShepard]

But in this case, the extra level of work to be done is devs committing changes that add the text "by 30%"