Barrier Planets also had a higher spawn rate due to Terminid Control System issue.
this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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Check the patch notes here. A week ago they tried to up the difficulty for solo players who would stealth around the map. If you look under the section Enemy Patrols:
Patrol spawning has been increased when there are fewer than 4 players. The fewer the players the bigger the change. For 4 player missions there will be no change compared to before.The biggest noticeable change will be for solo players at higher difficulties
IIRC, the reasoning was that spawn rates were lower than they had intended, and they were bringing them up to the intended values - I think they said that a solo player was actually getting 1/6 the spawns of a four player group, instead of a quarter.
The original was pretty even in difficulty though, if I'd have to choose between fighting a single patrol with a charger in it vs fighting two of that with a teammate... Imma take the latter
Yeah that's a good point. The number of enemies doesn't scale linearly with the number of Helldivers. If you're solo and have to deal with light and heavy enemies yourself, it's much less efficient that having two divers with one clearing the small stuff and one clearing the heavies.
This is the cause. They want to encourage 4 person drops, even with randoms, so creating an element of hopelessness for smaller squads makes sense
makes sense
I was nodding along until this. It does not, and it's a dick move. I soloed for my first 20+ hrs in, until my squad actually bought the damn thing and started playing. I would not have put in nearly as much time had it been this bullshit every drop.
If you're gonna make it damn near impossible to play at sub-4, then just don't offer that option. What a bunch of shit.
It makes no sense to dick over solo or in my case two players and making it unenjoyable, impossible to win. Just kind of a dumb move in my opinion.
I recall them doing a spawn increase several weeks ago. Are you comparing to before that or directly before and after the most recent update?
Could be A: People did too well on the kill a billion bugs mission and defence missions so they were trying to balance that. Or, B: the development team are all disillusioned, don't know what to patch anymore. I'm doubtful it's B, or anything else related to the linking fiasco. It's just unfortunate.
The last major patch, 1.000.300, had this as a note:
"Enemy Patrols 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.
- Balancing adjustment to patrol spawning.
- Patrol spawning has been increased when there are fewer than 4 players. The fewer the players the bigger the change. For 4 player missions there will be no change compared to before.The biggest noticeable change will be for solo players at higher difficulties."
Originally the paragraph about it being unintended was not included and was edited in later, and this is listed under gameplay balancing, so my critique is that if it was unintended it should've been listed under fixes, and would help prevent the perception that it was an unneeded balance change, and move it towards that this was a fix that was always supposed to be intended.
I still think even if it was unintended that they should've left the rates how they were, it worked just fine and was still challenging, and even with open matchmaking sometimes my game just doesn't fill up, and add on to that that randoms don't always follow orders and may try to extract before super samples are collected on higher difficulties, etc.
Making higher difficulties more punishing for parties that are already very limited by being less than full just really didn't seem needed or asked for.
This. 🤌🏽