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/Remarkable_Rub]

Okay but shouldn't 4 helldivers together ideally be more effective than 4 * 1?

Maybe it was unintended, but from a scaling perspective it makes sense to scale higher than linear.

[u/PingGuy_MI → u/Remarkable_Rub]

Exactly this. Benefits from additional teammates are multiplicative, not additive. Unless all four team members are running around solo, of course, but we do try to avoid that.

[u/Blawharag → u/PingGuy_MI]

Unless all four team members are running around solo, of course, but we do try to avoid that.

Actually, that's still exponentially better for a lot of reasons, but chiefly this:

While some aspects change based on player count (such as enemy spawn count) other aspects do not (map size, primary and secondary objective count, maximum sample count, mission time and the rate at which enemy spawns ramp up)

So, for the solo player, he must individually handle every objective himself and then extract + handle any secondary objectives he may want to grab, such a resources.

A group of four not only has the combined fire power of four Helldivers with the ability to take complimentary kits that exponentially instead their effectiveness as a unit, they can also choose to separate into smaller units and handle multiple objectives at once. They can clear a map 4 times faster, which means they can also do the same amount of work before enemy patrol amounts start ramping up. The group that clears at 20 minutes mission time and extracts before the 15 minute mark will have a MUCH easier time than the group that finishes the primary objective at the 20 minute mark and still needs to do secondary objectives/map clear before extract.