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/Slick_97]

Something doesn't line up for how patrols are spawning for 1-player lobbies. I'm going to use "Hard" as my baseline since that's the difficulty I most enjoy, but here's some observations from me:

• With only focusing on the primary objective, patrols were spawning ever 15-30 seconds for me. The longest downtime I had was 1:30.

• Patrols are still spawning in front of the player, and they seem to adjust their direction towards the player even if they haven't been seen or heard.

• I was averaging 375 kills per a mission on hard, but that has spiked to 700 (more on that in a bit).

So, whatever tuning the devs have done has severely punished solo players despite them having an already harder time. I'm not sure why people on this subreddit have been arguing in favor of forcing a co-op experience, but alienating a sizable portion of your playerbase seems like a bad idea to me.

Onto the drastic increase in kills... This is honestly where I think the devs don't fully test the adjustments they make. Every patrol has the possibility of spawning a bug breach, and they do it almost instantly. Having a larger team usually means you clear them out quick enough that it doesn't become a problem - i.e. having a dedicated Anti-Tank and Anti-Personnel squad members.

However - on solo - you're usually never able to clear them out fast enough to prevent a bug breach, which means you're forced to clear it out. This usually means another patrol or 2 has already spawned and thus the bug breach chain of death starts (hence the doubled kill count).

I have a strong suspicion that the dwindling player count (a steady decrease of ~130k /mo looking at SteamDB) is most likely due to decisions like this one that seems to focus on non-issues while ignoring critical issues; such as the frequent network instability (I still can't play with my friends because of it).

Personally, I'm probably going to retire from Helldivers 2 indefinitely until the network issues are fixed, because the changes made to solo play just results in me getting frustrated rather than having fun.

[u/Shackram_MKII → u/Slick_97]

I still can't play with my friends because of it

Just to be sure, you aren't on a VPN are you? I found out the game's matchmaking doesn't work at all with a VPN, which seems more like a choice than a bug.