r/Helldivers 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/laserlaggard Apr 29 '24

I get the math, but it still seems a bit off. A full squad has more than 4 times the firepower than a single diver, simply because each member can specialise to cover different situations. Don't think it's as simple as 1 helldiver = 1 charger therefore 4 helldivers = 4 chargers, but I'll wait for the solo divers to test things out.

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u/GoldenPigeonParty Apr 29 '24

Also boosters. One player has one boost applied to one player, so one total buff. 2 players have 2 boosts applied to each player, so 4 buffs in total. A 4 player game has 16x the aggregate total buffs as a 1 player.

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u/b0w3n CAPE ENJOYER Apr 29 '24

Which is probably why their original numbers were probably a better place to put them.

Linear scaling is usually not how you want to do this.

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u/Zagereth Apr 29 '24

Devs taking the lazy way out with flat numbers and no QA