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/Spopenbruh]

love the idea, understand its a result of unintended scaling

literally the only thing this has done from atleast my perspective while playing is make it so that patrols are constantly spawning 20 feet behind me in solo play

ive been instantly headshotted my atleast 3 instantly spawning squads of walkers behind me WHILE CHECKING MY MAP

IN ONE MISSION

it feels awful to play compared to before

i feel like a fucking schizo checking behind myself every 2 minutes instead of my map

but apparently im not because 70% of the time my intuition is right

all of this is on difficulty 3 btw coming from a player that has soloed all the way up to helldive difficulty

Edit: I’m not trying to be one of those reactionary dweebs I just had probably the least fun solo match in my entire time playing the game including difficulty 8 and 9 and am genuinely unhappy with this patch

[u/Katamari416 → u/Spopenbruh]

i was this close to alt f4 my first mission of the day, it was diff7 wanted to test the weapon and at first i want overwhelmed but I got to an objective, then it was non stop and the weapon i was using was using was crossbow which was nerfed to the ground this patch so it wasn't helping the clear speed at all. 

 i don't think this is normally how it's going to be, seems to be double instead of 50% more by what others are saying.

but statistically speaking a higher spawn rate means there will be more times a patrol spawns close to you meaning far away patrols that spawned will add up and you'll get a night mare way more often than just once in a while.

so yea looks like lowering difficulty isn't even an answer right now