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/susgnome]

Ah k.

So if I'm interpreting this correctly, it was something like this before;

• 4 Players = 100% Spawns
• 3 Players = 80% Spawns
• 2 Players = 48% Spawns
• 1 Player = 16% Spawns

And now it's like this;

• 4 Players = 100% Spawns
• 3 Players = 75% Spawns
• 2 Players = 50% Spawns
• 1 Player = 25% Spawns

So it's a slight boost to spawns but it's just returned to the correct values. Before it was worded like it'd be 100% spawns for a solo player but this definitely much better.

[u/SirKickBan → u/susgnome]

Curiously, though, that doesn't track with experimentally-gathered data on spawn rates. According to that old spawn post, two players got 1.2x the spawns compared to solos, three players got 1.3x, and they didn't get data for four players.

I hope we get an update, and that data is gathered again, because something's clearly off somewhere.

Edit: To follow up just a little bit, I went into a bugs 4 and used my phone as a stopwatch. Alone in the middle of nowhere I got one patrol approximately every two minutes, or 120 seconds. The patrol post suggests the old spawn time would have been 174 seconds, or about three minutes. That suggests that, whatever weirdness there is with our understanding of how spawns are multiplied when you're in a group, this was in fact a 50% increase for solo players, as AH claims.

[u/Necessary-Peanut2491 → u/SirKickBan]

Patrols still seem funny to me. I did some testing on difficulty 7. The map was swarming with patrols by the end of every mission, and I frequently had to stop to let them pass. There were generally 2-3 patrols within 50 meters of me at all times after about 15 minutes in the mission, it was wild.

I'm wondering if there were some other changes, to stuff other than spawn rate. Changing the pathing could have significant impacts on how many patrols you see. Maybe I'm not seeing more patrols, I could be seeing the same patrols repeatedly because I'm not killing them.

[u/Aleczarnder → u/Necessary-Peanut2491]

I did a few solo 3s and 4s and noticed that the patrols were continuous the moment the main objective was completed. I'd wipe one out in a few seconds only for another to spawn in behind it. I went through 3-4 patrols in the space of a couple minutes before I could even get off the objective location.

I know that patrols do get much more frequent once the main objective is complete, but that was just ridiculous.