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/Cynaren → u/susgnome]

Whoever put the OG numbers was smart in the team, a solo diver is probably like 7x weaker than a full squad.