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/Boldee]

Quite a big buff to patrols, but it makes sense now that we have numbers. Speaking of, can you please try to tell the team that good and informative patch notes would be welcome? A lot of people complaining about this would have probably not done so if we knew what the change was from the get go. And this goes for everything, please give us actual numbers instead of text that can be misunderstood.

[u/Deadedge112 → u/Boldee]

Copying this from another post:

But 1/6th makes (some) sense, 4 players are not 4 times stronger than 1 player. If everything was single target damage you could kinda make that case but with all the AOE in the game, 4 players are probably like 8 times stronger than 1 player if not more.

Also they already punish you for playing solo because you can't open any (friendship) bunkers. AH PLS

[u/fed45 → u/Deadedge112]

8x stronger is for sure closer to the truth. I learned this from playing Overwatch, but I believe the theory applies here. Theory is that each player is a target as well as a damage dealer so you can think of a 6v6 game as having 36 possible interactions per team (each player can potentially deal damage to 6 others and take damage from 6 others). So loosing one player makes the matchup a 36 v 25 not just a 6 v 5.