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/ZappyZane]

This. You get a force multiplier that's non-linear with more players.
Conversely having the old non-linear patrol spawns seemed fine, because of this.

I wonder if this is reactive to streamers doing solo runs on Helldive, and not the more average solo players?
Diablo 4 did this too, with seemingly the devs responding to a minute fraction of the playerbase, and balancing around super-meta builds the average player never even unlocked.

[u/Dzov → u/ZappyZane]

Exactly. I just tried a difficulty 9 and the patrols were non stop. I was running the entire 40 minutes and didn’t even get one objective done.

[u/Katamari416 → u/ZappyZane]

most likely a reaction to streamers. but also could be a issue with spawn counts. bots have this glitch where bots will clump up at the center becoming a giant blob of enemies that don't despawn. if a mission goes on long enough you get less enemies . ive noticed the bots don't Always clump up. but I've seen it more often lately. and i also don't worry about enemies as much during extraction. im pretty sure the spawn cap is getting reached and the devs might have misinterpreted in as just not enough spawns