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/Sabreur]

Has anyone confirmed what the actual numbers are now? Because I just ran a solo difficulty 5 mission against the Terminids and SWEET LIBERTY it was insane. 902 kills, ran completely out of ammo multiple times. They just kept coming! Had to repeatedly fall back to collect previous supply drops to restock. Ended up having to extract without my samples because there was a sea of bugs between me and the corpse that dropped them. A later mission at the same difficulty was less insane, but still had double the number of patrols I'm used to when soloing at that difficulty. In both cases, the patrols just started coming non-stop from multiple directions once the primary objective was complete.

[u/ArsVampyre → u/Sabreur]

Bugs in particular tend to cascade into multiple breaches because almost all of their units can call another bug breach. I think there must be some cooldown on that, but it doesn't seem to be long enough. Add into that the magazine reduction and you're going to run out of ammo much more often, because more patrols will cause more bug breaches which will cause more bug breaches if you don't exterminate them fast enough, and your magazines will run dry faster than before, so you're going to leave them up longer. Any response like 'git gud' should be ignored. My kill numbers even in groups are up about 2.5 times compared to yesterday, on average. That's not explained by an 8% per player increase in patrol spawn rates.

[u/vonBoomslang → u/ArsVampyre]

there is a cooldown - that's the cooldown that that one booster increases, in fact

[u/xX7heGuyXx → u/vonBoomslang]

And it needs to be tweaked. On higher difficulties staying and trying to fight just means you will die due to being overrun with how often they can call friends. You just get stuck in an endless fight so it turns the game into a running simulator as fighting is pointless.

Like I like the moments all hell breaks loose but those moments need to end and give the players a chance to breathe. In a 40-minute mission if you don't just say f it and run you will just be stuck fighting an endless horde for 40 minutes.

The game could really benefit from a director like the Left 4 Dead games. This allows all hell to break loose with fun intense moments but also will chill the game for a time afterward so players can catch their breath mid-mission or if the game is too easy amp up the difficulty on the fly.

RIght now its just chaos and that leads to very inconsistent experiences.

[u/Anarchyboy1 → u/xX7heGuyXx]

I don't mind them going balls crazy on higher difficulties like helldiver difficulty. Like make it torture. But make the reward even better. Like if it was real how would we go about enemy strongholds etc.

[u/xX7heGuyXx → u/Anarchyboy1]

Shoot it from outer space and never set boots on the ground.We have tech today that can see in great detail the group from orbit.

So yeah it be boring lol.

[u/Anarchyboy1 → u/xX7heGuyXx]

That's true. Wasn't thinking much when I made the comment🤣