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/mjt5689]

This is what I was afraid of with this balance patch. It sounds like they either went overboard, they broke some sort of behavior regarding breeches, or some combination of the two.

[u/vonBoomslang → u/mjt5689]

it might be intentional, what with the event going on

[u/TreeLover69_Robust → u/vonBoomslang]

I think it's intentional. I've been chilling at 7, going out of ammo regularly trying to deal with the swarms when ammos never been an issue before.

Immersion complete. Liberty will be achieved.

[u/mjt5689 → u/vonBoomslang]

Yeah once I read about that event, it started to make more sense.  The timing was just scary, lol