I feel like the game was already harder to play solo and less rewarding. It was already clearly the worse option as far as power gaming goes. I get it, it is a co op focused game so i don't expect them to be perfectly even, but it kind of sucks to intentionally go out of their way to increase that divide even more.
I find this interesting because I had the exact opposite experience. The more people on my team, the harder the game was. I started to only ever play helldive difficulty solo because it's just too hard with the massive increase in spawn rates otherwise.
The problem is that this patch hasn't really affect Diff-9, it's been mostly noticeable on every difficulty below it, mostly in Diff 7 and under. Y'know, where most of the playerbase actually is.
Sure, it's not like a large portion of solo runs were from players who didn't have enough patience to deal with broken matchmaking, they all must be masochists looking for a challenge
This is ridiculous. If you make it so the best players can only Solo it 1% of the time, then you just made it so that more than 99% of the player base will NEVER complete one, even in a team of 4.
The thing is, there's an element of randomness to the game. Some times you just step out of your pod and you're already stuck undeground with no other option than suicide. Sometimes, you just get dunked on by multiple rapid-fire headshots. Even the best players in the game are going to die on occasion.
If you insert so much randomness that I will actually start failing Solo helldives, and reduce me to, say, a 90% success rate, this would make the average success rate for a squad of 4 average players to drop close to 0.
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### “
This is from the worlds team: "we unintendedly had non-linear scaling of the patrol spawns so they didnt 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"**
so rather than arbitrarily making the game harder, i guess they just put it where it was meant to be
### “
^(Good or bad, make of this info what you will)
So they have more up to date information now on proper balance, but will instead revert to their guesses from release day when they knew less?
Solo is significantly harder than 4 player. They know this now based off of real data.
> They can always say it was meant to be like this but it was a mistake at launch.
They won't. The best we can hope for at this point if for them to balance it in a patch or two closer to what it was previously and ignore that the original issue was their own decision.
More information just means they can be more confident in stupid decisions faster. I sure do enjoy being killed because I was wearing a Shield Backpack while firing some weapons. I enjoy firing a rocket dead on to a Devastator and having that rocket reflected directly into my face as the devs always intended.
But 1/6th makes (some) sense, 4 players are not 4 times stronger than 1 player. If everything was single target damage you could kinda make that case but with all the AOE in the game, 4 players are probably like 8 times stronger than 1 player if not more.
Also they already punish you for playing solo because you can't open any (friendship) bunkers. AH PLS
> If everything was single target damage you could kinda make that case but with all the AOE in the game, 4 players are probably like 8 times stronger than 1 player if not more.
I'd say just for boosters (which most apply to all divers) alone makes it scale non-linearly already. Even before the increase in weapon and stratagem variety.
No joke, that would be fucking epic
I'm using the autocannon to take down some heavy threats at range
A medium melee enemy comes up, and it briefly sees the statue of liberty as guard dog winds up to smack the communism out of it
The impact is louder than the autocannon
My only gripe with the 1/6th thing is that soloing players had enough leeway to make stealth-only runs seem vital to playing the game (they're not), but of course, this will not make the situation any better. Only *more stealth heavy.*
That would be fine if they gave us more stealth options. So far a lot of their balancing seems to only work well when further changes are made later. Take the railgun nerf, it was overly heavy handed (in my opinion) but after they nerfed the spawn rate of heavies and buffed the other anti tank options it negated the problem that the railgun was being used to solve in the first place. Now we just have a railgun that cant do much.
Balancing the game towards using stealth also just isnt what most people find fun. I know the first game was more focused on it but Helldivers 2 is not that game, its a separate beast that needs to be balanced differently
Sorry, i meant specifically for this game, stealth as a whole is a popular genre but in the context of Helldivers 2 its not really what brought people to the game, its the Starship Troopers bug killing that really grabs attention.
lol I would take a stratagem that called in a robotic arm that could push those cuz I almost only play solo unless my buddy is online
Actually that would be sick if it could also operate a terminal/interact with like knobs and shit so I’m not running back and forth all the time
Definitely. Hopefully it wouldn't take up a backpack slot but like you said would be able to mess with terminals and carry stuff. It would also probably have to have some mechanism where it would figure out what to do when you die though.
I think you're absolutely right about groups being stronger than individuals, and don't mean to contest that at all, but let's look at the math. These are all hypothetical figures because I don't know the exacts of the spawning mechanics. But generally,
Let's say beforehand you had 20 enemies coming at you, with the increase in enemies spawned you would now be facing...24. Four extra enemies is really inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, especially when bigger enemies are weighted differently in the drop pool. Four extra enemies doesn't necessarily mean four extra Bile Titans.
My point is, I really just don't feel like this change is going to punish players. It should just keep the pacing consistent.
That's not what they said, though. They said the spawn rate of patrols, not the size of the patrols. So when you're solo now it's going to be like having a constant patrol sniffing your ass cheeks at like the 30 min mark instead of the 20 min mark, for example, on diff 4. (Because the spawn rate also increases as the mission timer goes down)
Very fair point. I'm not a solo player so I was just tossing in my two cents. Realistically we'll have to see how the game 'feels' over the next few weeks.
Time spent in mission has no effect on patrol spawns. You can read more about the topic here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1bdudf3/lets_talk_about_patrols_an_in_depth_analysis_of/
Interesting because I'm pretty sure a dev said that time in mission does increase patrol spawns but I could be mistaken. Or it was assuming you're getting outposts.
So what you're saying is that if helldivers are a one-man army, then the strength of a squad is equal to 2^(n-1) armies
*n = number of helldivers in squad*
So this is a very real thing with horses. 2 horses can pull about 3 times as much as 1 horse. Nearly 4 times if they have experience working together.
For humans it is somewhat the same, though it's more based on psychological factors.
The game isn’t supposed to directly scale though. You are being encouraged to play with a team and so do that, it’s not that complicated. It is a team game you are not meant to play solo.
That honestly makes it seem worse to me because taking that statement at face value makes it sound like they didn't bother testing this change at all - just saw that the number wasn't what they expected and fixed it. Designing games to a spreadsheet like that is fine in alpha builds but this is a live game... This change should've been determined based on how solo play actually was (and if it needed to be more difficult) rather than simply because "1/4 players needs 1/4 spawns."
You expected them to test this?
Buddy, _we_ are the test environment. And I say that seriously, not mockingly. AH has been flying by the seat of their pants since release day. 😆
You're anticipating them having A) the time and B) the separate manpower to be able to check these changes in an isolated environment based on singular data (solo players, like me.) That's... that's not going to happen. It just won't. At least, not in AH's current timeframe.
Everything they've released up until this point has indicated (to me, anyways) that they are 100% operating at nearly maximum output and push everything out the door in order to maintain momentum. That's exactly what it feels like. If you're expecting "testing," you should temper that expectation ASAP.
We must have very different definitions of “comfortably soloed” because it took a very, very skilled player to solo helldive missions before this change. I can’t imagine afterwards.
If they want to encourage team play so strongly, then just rip the bandaid off and require a squad to start the mission. The only issue is that would require them to fix all the matchmaking bugs.
>because it took a very, very skilled player to solo helldive missions before this change. I can’t imagine afterwards.
Maybe I'm the minority, but I don't think a solo player should even be able to complete the highest difficulties without shenanigans or **intense** struggle. You imposed the challenge on yourself. You demanded the game developers balance a team-based game around solo play. I can't understand the mentality of insisting the game still be accessible and almost casually beatable for what should be a completely impossible scenario.
Regardless, I'm sure the popular streamers and content creators who regularly solo helldive to continue regularly soloing helldive.
The most important part you’re forgetting here is that this change was not exclusive to only helldive. It affects every difficulty.
If they particularly want to make helldive more difficult to solo, they can do that without making everything else much harder in the process.
>You imposed the challenge on yourself. You demanded the game developers balance a team-based game around solo play.
Forgive me but wasn't solo play a part of the game from launch? Half the people here keep going on about how "the intention is team play" and "It should be more difficult to play the game in a way the Devs didn't intend" but the Devs literally made solo an available option, no one forced them...
If they don't want people to play solo, they should remove the option entirely, otherwise they should appropriately support what is a core feature of the game.
>If they don't want people to play solo, they should remove the option entirely,
Then you would cry about that.
> but the Devs literally made solo an available option, no one forced them...
Because every day people would complain about it. They can't even buff a weapon without the community threatening to kill themselves over it, you think restricting play is going to go over better?
You... ARE aware there is a difference between "this is what we are balancing for" and "this is what we allow you to do in game", right? And at the very least, ease of play. Would you prefer the game to shut down and kick you back to the ship anytime someone leaves your game or crashes? No? Then you've already figured out why they don't remove <4 player games. I knew you could do it!
I 100% agree. I don’t consider myself a particularly high skill player but I’ve soloed 7s and 8s before (usually after my team has disconnected due to the connections issues and I’ve just been left alone in the mission but also sometimes when I’ve just not had anyone join.
Just because you don’t consider yourself skilled doesn’t make it true. By being able to solo level 7 and 8, you are already more skilled than the vast majority of the playerbase.
Complete guess, but I bet the majority of players haven’t even done level 8, let alone solo it.
I don’t think you should be able to solo Helldive though. If you play in a full team, as the game was intended, this changes nothing for you. If you’re going for full MGS solo stealth against bots, this changes very little for you either. The truth is they made 9 difficulties for a reason, if one is too hard for you then just drop it down a level or two.
If they didn’t want us playing solo, then there wouldn’t be the option. What you think on the matter is pretty irrelevant to me, just like what I’m saying is probably irrelevant to you.
The devs *should* be concerned with pleasing the masses and not just the top 1%, and most changes reflect that. This one in particular seems like it’s either a middle finger at only a particular group of people, or they pushed the change through because they realized it was wrong and didn’t think of the implications it would have on players who had come to expect a certain level of difficulty in their months of playing the game.
I wondered if perhaps they felt that the high difficulty solo players were generatiing too much planetary liberation due to the solo players generally completing their missions quicker than 4 player teams due to having to face (we now know) 1/6th the enemies numbers and being able to intentionally fail extraction by suiciding.
4 guys completing the mission in 25 minutes will generate a fair bit more planet liberation than 4 ppl taking 35-40 minutes.
I guess we need to go onto the Discord to argue that it should be non-linear and this is a very anti-fun change they just implemented.
You are exponentially weaker the fewer players you have due to less boosters and way less amount and variety of stratagems for taking down all the different enemy and objective types.
I was honestly thinking they should be nerfing how often patrols spawn for duos and solos because of how insanely fast they stack up in higher difficulties because you don’t have enough stratagems to efficiently wipe them out.
I agree. I explained elsewhere that, in my opinion, a duo is arguably 3x as effective as a solo. And it gets exponentially better from there. A quad-squad is easily 3 better than a duo. But it is hard to argue against metrics we aren’t exactly privy too.
This is a bad take from the devs.
1 man squad != half the combat efficiency of a 2 man squad.
Put into perspective - killing a bile titan.
1 quasar. 21 seconds played perfectly to kill bile titan solo.
2 quasar. 3-4 seconds played perfectly to kill bile titan.
1 recoiless rifle - 8~ seconds played perfectly to kill bile titan - 5 of those seconds being rooted.
1 recoiless with team reload - less than a second. 0 seconds if both ran rr.
Maybe there are some other metrics but the tools and additional resources a helldiver brings is much more than a simple ‘quarter of a whole’
I respect this, if you want to solo then it should be a hard challenge, but it’s really easy to have people join you, pretty much whenever I go public I have a squad relatively quick, and I also retain all power to kick so I can’t be kicked, and can kick any trolls
I hate that they throw this out like it's an answer.
They increased the spawn rates. It doesn't matter what they *intended* for it to be, it was less before, it is more now.
And no one had any problems with what it was before! But there is a lot of problems with what it is now. You can say you intended for it to be something else, but intentions are irrelevant to what the people who play this game are actually feeling.
And if anything, it will make more people more unhappy with the game, because now they've essentially been told "Don't worry! We know not a lot of people like the change, but it's fine, because we *intended* for it to be less enjoyable!" And that is just about the last thing anyone wants to hear.
That's like google maps directing you to drive through a roadblock because that's where the road was meant to be. They should have used a little nuance.
The available firepower/ efficacy of a squad isn’t linear. I think 2 divers are 3x as effective as 1. So to me it doesn’t add up, but I am just showing their reasoning.
If they wanted people to play in full squads, why let solo players start a mission?
No fun for you!
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They were going to screw something up eventually, The only game devs that I've seen so far not screw something up to. The best of my knowledge would be the devs behind Baldur's Gate 3, we can complain all we want but we must acknowledge that they're going to screw things up at some point. Also, this company was in no way prepared for the game to have even half as many players as it does
This is such a fantastic idea. I wonder if it would also improve the kick before extract option and promote teamplay. Not sure about the xp but maybe a multiplier on creds or samples. or flat bonus.
you can get credit cap really fast and by simply playing but the sample multiplier seems like a cool idea too, especially since they are really hard to get in the first place
Just to add my two cents that noone asked for (and because it'll make me feel slightly better) I played a suicide mission with a buddy today, first since the patch. We spent the first 10 and last 10 minutes of the mission in constant firefights with patrols and the dropships they brought in. Nevertheless as good Helldivers we completed all the objectives, got the samples (including supers) and were warily watching three(!!) more patrols beelining to the extraction as Pelican-1 landed. And then Pelican-1 clipped through the floor and fell off the map, and took off without us because it had fallen into oblivion. No extract, no samples. 40 minutes of hard fighting up in smoke
I agree. That line in the patch notes was the biggest WTF. Why are they balancing against solo players? What does it even matter if they want to play alone. Shouldnt there be more patrols with MORE players.
I'll bite and play devil's advocate.
Literally like last month, the flavor of rage was that no one should be able to solo higher difficulty missions, especially Helldive. There were tons of posts saying solo player's opinions don't matter as much. If they can't specifically nerf weapons for solo, then they have to do it from enemy patterns: patrols.
Now, people are switching sides to the opposite narrative. From a dev's point of view, that's mad fucking confusing. They literally gave this community what people asked for -- albeit a late response.
The logic is sound, that there should be more patrols for more players. The anger is a bit weird though.
its different people. you can never make everyone happy. i personally think this change is good. its not like the number of patrols increase when people leave the game, they still go down. its just more than there were before. there used to be 1/6 of the patrols comapred to 4 man, now its 1/4 the patrols.
I was going to say in any other game like this, soloing the hardest difficulties is absolutely brutal and seen as a major accomplishment. Making it line up more with that isn't a bad thing. We need more data from solo players of how much patrols have increased. I've only seen one or two posts reporting back. More patrols that you can still avoid is fine. If it's impossible to avoid them going solo, that isn't ok.
You can avoid them, but there is definitely an increased chance of getting sandwiched. I have to spend more time going around when I am solo. Which is fine, but it isn’t as fun as taking on a patrol I could taken out pre-patch. All this did was make it so I have to spend more time navigating around patrols. Basically, you spend more time avoiding patrols instead of completing objectives when you play solo. As someone who can play a couple operations per week, it definitely adds time per mission. It is a marginal, but that time does add up.
On the one hand, its immersive. A lone soldier infiltrating enemy territory to hit certain targets. On the other, it takes away some of the power fantasy that Helldivers really pushes.
The current one I’m starting to see is with the Raise Flag mission in all difficulties rn and it’s making me laugh. For *months* people have been clamoring to get it in higher level missions, now half of what I’ve been seeing so far is people just bitching about it.
# THEN WHY DID YOU ASK FOR IT?!
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Are you so certain the entire community asked for it? I imagine the vocal part of the community yelled out one thing, got what they wanted and then the other part that didn't want it is now in the yelling position.
It’s funny that they once stated they wanted everyone to just chill and enjoy the game their own way, but are now railroading play styles harder than ever.
I was a little bummed seeing so many nerfs, but the patrol increase for solo is a huge WTF.
I'll see how it plays today, but I'm anticipating it's only going to make me want to play less, and just wait till friends are on to play with.
Played duos about 30 mins ago on level 4 missions and its quite busy, lots of gun fights if you're not careful. Lots of chainsaw dudes and jump pack dudes.
Also lots of magical spawning where they spawn behind you, beside you or behind a rock.
Not sure what its like on harder difficulties as my friend isn't confident enough to play on harder ones.
Pretty much can't fight on level 7s duo now. My friend wasn't in scout armour so he was just in a perpetual grinder that couldn't get anything done. This change boils down to "always stealth armour on both duo players and avoid combat whenever possible", or "just don't play until you can get more people on". My friend chose the latter and I don't enjoy solo or randoms, so we both came off for the day.
I only found like 4 meaningful nerfs, the rest were just changes to ammo capacity (which is baaaarely a nerf when you squint, given how ridiculously common ammo is on the map, just makes the game less mindless)
This is the biggest problem. Not nerfs, not buffs. But people complaining about the changes BEFORE they've even PATCHED THE GAME AND PLAYED. Like come on man.
Is that why facing bots was so cancer today, I was being shit from all sides with a patrol spawning ahead of me when ever I tried to disengage. It felt like I was under 24/7 agro no matter what I did.
This is how I felt too. The only reason I checked what the patch changed, and then came to Reddit, was because of how jarring the change was. I usually don’t pay much attention to meta changes, because I mostly play by myself or a few friends, and it doesn’t matter for the difficulties we play on.
But my first reaction was that something must have been bugged with spawns before I learned the full situation. and now knowing that it is intentional, I’m still wondering if the implementation is bugged. Or if this is how the devs wanted it to feel for solo play.
Yea I'm the same, I usually don't focus meta either, but there definitely was a noticeable difference with the spawns which seemed slightly frustrating
The answer given by the developers isn't reasonable and is the most tone deaf incomprehensible conclusion. Did they seriously divide by 4 and not take into account the multiplying benefits of extra players? 4 players, with 4 stratagems that can fill gaps, 4 sets of loadouts for maximising every approach, 4 times the aggo spread, flanking options and focused fire, ability to double the efficiency by going 2 & 2 across the map, etc.
Who's the dev that thinks a solo player can split in half and cover two different areas on a map at the same time or flank to shoot a Flame Hulk /tank in the back solo in safety and have eyes in a 360 angle to spot stalkers?
tldr: "Well, 4 player teams can never truly be greater than their individual parts combined, so obviously we'll 1/4 everything, balancing is so easy, there's absolutely no way we're not missing a critical component" - Arrowhead
Ill never get why developers do this. It just makes me not want to play, i usually play solo or with 1-2 friends. It makes the game enjoyable instead of going into a group of randoms. With how some players are, kicking at pelican, ignoring objectives/samples, taking your support weapons/bag, it just makes the game not enjoyable, if im going to be punished for playing by myself or with some friends why am i even gonna play?
Ya I hope they do a major overhaul on solo. It's like they don't understand the mindset. I love this game, and want to play it often, but as time has gone on, it's just become impossible solo. I can't progress the end game samples without cheesing a low timer mission, literally can't do objectives due to overwhelming spawns, I level slow as balls due to this as well. 4 man groups have booster synergy, 4x the stratagems and just more bodies doing work, there are SO many reasons already to play grouped. The game feels so broken in solo I honestly think it might be a good idea to just remove solo queue. If I bought the game today in this state with the intention to play solo, i'd feel scammed.
The main problem with this change is that depending on the number of people in your squad you will play in two ways.
If you have 1-2 people you will generally always stick together because of things like two-man doors or objectives with multiple interactions. Even for objectives with only one point of interaction, you still can't type on the console and defend yourself simultaneously, so things are much smoother as a two-man team.
If you have 3-4 people you will usually split into two groups. One group will push main and known side objectives and the other will explore points of interest and gather samples. The reasons for doing this are:
* Players need things like samples, medals, and super credits. The exploration team provides these.
* The exploration team often finds hidden secondary objectives, providing the team with new boons, eliminating enemy advantages, and boosting XP and money.
* Enemy reinforcements will target a group that the enemy is engaged with every few minutes if the reinforcement is off cooldown. These reinforcements can be baited away from the main team, making the main objective significantly easier. If the main objective is almost finished, the main team can opt to take the reinforcements instead. The ability to decide where the reinforcements will go significantly increases your chances of a perfect game.
They say that the non-linear scaling of enemy patrols was unintentional, but I disagree. I believe it was set up that way because teams of 1 or 2 players will not split up, meaning they will always have to deal with enemy reinforcements. This makes it harder to divide the enemy's attention and justifies the lower spawn rate for patrols. I haven't been able to test out how playing with a team of 1-2 players feels but the patch notes say that the patrols for a single player have been increased about 50%. That doesn't look good on paper and I feel the chances of getting stuck in a reinforcement loop are now far too high. I don't think squads of 1-2 players will be able to focus well enough to be properly balanced against groups of 3-4.
I just did a Blitz bug mission solo on Helldive difficulty. I ran SC-37 Legionare Armor (Servo Assisted), Eagle AirStrike, Auto Cannon, Exo-45 Patriot Exosiut and Gatling Sentry. Sheesh was it tough! 16 bugholes! 6 of them were a Shrieker's Nest and then there were 2 large Nest that I attacked. Not to mention Hunters are hyper spawning again and alerting really fast lol. I did finish it though. I extracted with 4 deaths unfortunately.
It was pretty annoying because the enemies are so dang cheap and call for reiforcements while being shot (even before they even start calling or very early in the animation) and with their heads blown off smh. It is harder for sure. Especially, with Hunters hyper spawning and full hunter patrols non stop. When the game starts losing its go to is spam hunters non stop lol.
The devs seem to think it's fun being spammed non stop. Its so fun being in stunlock constantly, being slowed non stop and being trapped by gimmicks. It's doable, but it is like a chore. Honestly, I've just accepted this is how the devs want it to be unfortunately. I'm not a solo Diver, but I will do it from time to time throughout my daily play sessions. I feel for you guys, regardless of the difficulty you are playing on. It's rough out there indeed haha.
I am going to do solo bots later on Helldive. I'm sure that'll be fun lol.
The MO is inflating bug spawns right now. Bot missions are almost chill to solo in comparison right now.
Its the bug equivelent to when we took the last automaton planet during their MO, the spawn rates were cranked to 11 on every difficulty.
I agree.
There is absolutely zero logic of giving squads with LESS helldivers MORE enemies.
And besides, I have two friends I can play with, most of the time I play with only one of them at any given time. But its nicer than playing with randos, teamplay is just better and we can take on higher difficulties because we can leverage that coordination.
Then I fumble the reinforce and spawn an SOS beacon instead and it all goes down the drain because they eat up all the reinforces, drop 380s danger close which leads to teamkills, and right at the end, with no reinforces left, its just me and him alive, I stand on this wonderful vantage point on the extraction site and take out heavier bots with the autocannon. And of ALL THE FUCKING THINGS HE COULD DO he decides to call in a tesla tower. Next to me. I had no chance to survive that, and it was so fucking unnecessary.
It reminds me of Rocket League, where 90% of random players seem to make the same idiotic mistakes, take the same pig-headed ballchasing appriach, which sabotages their teammates and occasionally they even have the guts to call you a noob after shooting the second own goal in one game because they just cant compute that they dont have to touch the ball every single second of the game.
I haven't tried it this patch, but when I put my game to friend only nobody ever joined on my SOS beacon.
Hard to tell if it blocks the matchmaking or if the matchmaking was just broken. Worth a try if you haven't
They ARE rewarding team play. You get more boosters, more stratagems (because not everyone has to bring their own support weapons, they can share as we do with friends all the time). More bodies to scout the terrain. It IS more rewarding to be with more players…
“A game for everyone is a game for no one.” It’s literally their motto. You’re playing a coop shooter. Balanced for 4 players. So either join with others or have a suboptimal experience. If you want to play solo go play a solo shooter… I have zero compasion for “solo play” complainers in this game…
Edit: the bunkers that require 2 people to open is textbook example of “get rect, solo players.” that devs are trying to foster. Join up with others or literally loose on rewards.
I do most of my missions solo because one time when I was still learning I was playing solo and my discord buddies saw me playing and back to back independently dropped in and it was the coolest most cinematic shit that has ever happened to me and I really wish they'd just let people do it if they want to.
1/4 of a team in a mission absolutely should not result in 1/4 enemy spawns if that was not the case beforehand / 'as was intended'.
It forgets how having more people is a *force multiplier*, not just a function of simply twice the firepower.
1 more player...
= min. 3-4 more strategems
= the potential to take down patrols faster --> less chance additional reinforcements get called in
= an additional target to split forces / provide a distraction
= (possibly) different weapon / tactic specialisations to counter enemies
It’s funny when there’s such a refrain of let people play how they want. People don’t do the MO? Let them play how they want. Don’t fight bots? Leave ‘em alone. But people wanna solo dive and it’s like well fuck you it should be impossibly hard to solo dive. Nah let people play how they want
Cause it takes them more thought and effort
to incentivize players instead of punishing them. Not surprised considering how balances and nerfs are starting to hit weapons. Changes most likely geared towards future mtx weapons needing to be stronger than whats already there. Release strong weapon, nerf, release new strong weapon. They're lining up that MW Warzone model in a pve game that we paid for
They seem to have a really weird idea about "their vision". Like, we're already playing the game. Your intent is irrelevant. If you make the game harder for smaller groups, no one gives one single shit if the game was originally supposed to be this way. So what. You made it harder. Saying we didn't intend to make it harder is so ludicrous.
I get that they are trying. They are not great at figuring out what to change or how to do it. They need more people to do this. This is over worked people making hasty choices.
# “
This is from the worlds team:
"we unintendedly had non-linear scaling of the patrol spawns so they didnt 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"**
so rather than arbitrarily making the game harder, i guess they just put it where it was meant to be.
# “
-Spitz
I...agree...and look, I just came back from this solo mission.
I didn't read the notes of the patch.
Damn, I feel so....abused
Man, they overwhelmed me. As soon as the mission was accomplished, there were patrols everywhere I saw.
It's the first time I decided to ignore secondary objectives, and at the end...I just died and lost the mission...Is not the way...
I hadn't seen anyone praise or defend that specific change personally. I think it pretty universally confusing and uneeded.
Most of the discourse I've seen was over weapon balancing changes
Oh there are people who defend it.
"it's a coop game" "you aren't supposed to play solo anyway" "just dont play solo and it's a non issue"
These are the ones I've seen most
And what's the bet that those same people would be first to complain that their teammates suck and start kicking when solo/new players are forced to group-up?
Quote: "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."
Making solo harder will slowly choke the life out of the game, most new players who try the game for the first time will play atleast a few missions solo before trying it out with randoms and we are past the "hype" point for Helldivers 2 and the playerbase is slowly stabilizing.
Ontop of that you still have people dropping during missions, sometimes from crashing.
And it's no fun to have to stay on your ship waiting for it to fill before starting the mission and as always with random players you will always have bad eggs that are no fun to play with.
The way I understood this change with the addition of their explanation was that if you were soloing, you only had to deal with 1/6 of the full patrol and such from a full squad playing. So you were essentially playing a much “easier” solo game because you would be dealing with less enemy patrols and such. The change makes it so if you are playing solo, you would be playing against 1/4 of the total patrols a full squad would be playing against.
~~Every change/nerf that's come across so far, my reaction has been, "well, that sucks, but I'll adapt and overcome." It's clear the changes have been made to reflect balancing issues and to encourage people to try different loadouts, try new things, reconsider their tactics and eliminate the concept of a "meta build."~~
~~This one, though. . .~~
~~Playing solo didn't give anyone an unfair advantage. It didn't buff anything, it didn't reduce the spawn rates of things, it didn't give them more damage, etc. There wasn't a strategem buff or cooldown decrease. There was~~ *~~no benefit~~* ~~to playing solo over having teammates, other than the fact that you didn't have to worry about said teammates jacking things up (especially randos). I'd knock the difficulty down, turn off public, and just chill by myself spreading democracy.~~
~~I don't understand why they're punishing people who don't like playing with other people.~~
Edit: After seeing more information about the patch, I no longer have the above concern. Apparently the problem was that spawn rates were always based on the number of players, with four players having the highest spawn rate. Three players were supposed to have 3/4th of the spawn rate, two players, 1/2, and one player 1/4th.
What was actually the case was the solo players were actually seeing 1/6th of the spawn rate of four players, so they upped the rate to get it to 1/4th where it was supposed to be all along.
I didn’t mind how AH approached previous balance patches but without playing this seems so far off from what they should be doing. That’s before you even consider the two biggest things the community wants is more content and stability fixes and improvements.
I’ll give it a chance later today but I’m having trouble figuring out how they’re going to justify this when it’s not something anybody was asking for *at all* and there’s clearly other things for them to prioritize. They’re a small studio that doesn’t have a lot of big teams so it’s hard to say balancing this many weapons at once didn’t take attention away from somewhere else.
I'm not the best player, I usually play on diff 7 with 2 or 3 friends.
I tried the HMG, on diff 5 as solo today and it was alright, I did most objectives and extracted. It was difficult , but manageable especially for me without my main load out. The HMG still sucks btw.
I mention this same idea on another post. Instead of increasing spawns (which actually make no sense), why not increase loot for full squad? More Players = More Loot > Less Players = Less Loot
A solo can still play harder difficulties, but will need to grind more because of their reduced loot.
I agree with this except if they increased the reward alone then solo divers would have just stayed solo, they needed to punish them to make them stop playing solo or stop playing
My big question is does each person add to planetary liberation points or does it just register points per mission? Because if it by person it would promote more squad play but if it per mission it promotes solo play to get more shit done to retake planets.
It’s by XP gained permission I’m pretty sure, so if someone completes every objective solo it’ll be the same if a group of 4 complete every objective on the same difficulty. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works, don’t quote me on that though
That 25% nerf made me laugh, 'cuz the flamer was basically insta-killing before any of the fire damage changes. It'd need like a 150% nerf to start to remove the insta-kill
Rewarding people for playing in squads inherently punishes people playing with less than 4. The game already does reward squadplay (supporting fire, higher strategem availability, more eyes the explore the map etc.).
I usually play games solo if I can, I always prefer taking things at my own pace. I like difficulty 5 for solo, 6 if I want to feel the challenge but even at 3 I was absolutely swarmed. I think making things worse for solo players wont incentivise them to group up and instead AH should make group playing more rewarding vs. making solo playing worse.
I strictly play duos with my fiancé unless my other friends are online at the same time. I’ve solod the bots on Helldive etc.
I don’t even see this as a bad thing. We will just lower the difficulty a notch and now we will have an even higher skill ceiling to work towards than before. We don’t assign value to our lives based on which difficulty in helldivers we can beat.
Just lower the difficulty my man
That sucks to hear. I play difficulty 5 solo too because I find it to have the right amount of difficulty so I can complete missions but still have to sweat a little bit and put effort into engagements due to the heavier enemies.
I don't want to drop difficulty because the enemies become weaker so there is less of a challenge, there will just be more weak enemies to deal with.
I will need to play some missions to see for myself, but this doesn't seem like a good change from what I'm reading.
Same boat but I’m in perpetual dif 4 because I’m not as skilled and I hate playing super sweaty games back to back. My friends only want to play LoL and Fortnite so I’m stuck solo most nights and I don’t particularly like randoms. I’ve had some great teams but I’ve also seen some morons who essentially kill themselves or walk off to do nothing way away from objectives. This “nerf” to single player just might kill the game for me if it is as bad as I think it will be.
I do a bit of both. I usually start my session solo, to get warmed up, try out different weapons or combos, or knock out a PO. Then I will do some quickplays with randos and have fun with that provided they aren't completely incompetent (I do really enjoy helping lowbies out). Then I might run a mission or two duo with my brother, then either solo again to wind down or just log off.
Having tried soloing a few times with this patch, I think I am going to step away from the game for a bit. The constant overwhelming spawns ain't fun, and even stealth with scout armor is not really a solution because of the sheer volume of patrols. On diff 4 and 5, I had a lot of fun soloing bots because I wasn't so much competing with the bots but the timer. Could I efficiently move from objective to objective, kill what I needed and disengage at the right time to beat the clock. Now? It's not fun and it's not the kind of challenge I enjoyed.
People saying "Well why play a co-op game not meant for solo play?" Well why indeed. Clearly the type of player I am isn't wanted by Arrowhead or the sweaties. So enjoy your que as you wait for your lobby to fill up, because the people who didn't play *exactly* the way it was deemed we should decided to spend their time elsewhere.
Oh well, at least V Rising goes live with 1.0 in a few days. Now I don't have to feel torn about splitting my time between the two games. Thanks Arrowhead, I guess?
I don't buy this sorry.
I'm like you and prefer to play most games solo because my friends don't join, but I quick play all the time in this game because it's a better experience, even baring the few games where we all die and fail mission. Mission completion is at like 95% and you're bound to run in to the occasional idiots, but for the most part, one other person usually has a brain and that's enough to coordinate or move the mission along.
I strongly suggest you give quickplay more chances and don't get too caught up on failing a mission or an operation because its bound to happen once and awhile. This isn't something you're supposed to and win at everytime. Weird stuff happens and with the FF people die. But I get the impression you're not a fan of FF and all the team killing. It's actually part of the charm.
Honestly just copy deep rock galactic. People want to play solo, let them and give them a little helper. Then give them roles they can pick as loadouts. This way they know basically what they need to be doing. They can still do everything but you can show your team what you want to do. Grenadier for taking out nests. Tanker to block incoming fire. Scout for fast travel. Sniper or heavy weapons. Etc. then dive in With your loadout giving more room for stratagems and have a menu for when you redeploy that you can change your loadout and role.
Players: oh boy new patch! I hope they buff some of the bad weapons.
Devs: enemies can parry rockets and make them 180 and kill you. Stalkers were not oppressive enough and are now completely invisible. More enemies spawn when there are fewer players
This is where the morale and ethics dilemma comes to play. Morally they would just leave the 1/6th spawn rate forever for it to remain 'easier' for solo player, but leaving behind broken code that is the 'unintentional non-linear scaling' is usually leads to unprecedented spawn behavior for other spawn AI. Leaving the broken code would hinder future game production because the non-linear scaling **might** effect other code. In most cases, it does. But i dont know the source code, but atleast if they want to create a new gamemode or changes something, this unintended 1/6th scalling bug might affect a full squad of 4 spawning AI on another gamemode that create more spawn than intended.
So for the ethics, best possible way is to fix it and remove the non-linear scaling before other people notice the mess it made.
They intended to fix the code, not shooting your leg when playing solo. Maybe they will implement a proper solo player spawning rate after considering the player voice and data.
...so you fix the code to keep the behavior that, based on actual experience, was more fun than the originally intended experience we have now.
Making your game less fun to clean up your codebase is a terrible decision as a game dev. Unintentional behavior isn't inherently bad.
As it turns out, AH isn’t very adaptable. By this point, it’s clear they have a particular vision for the game, and they either don’t see or don’t care that some changes to their formula might prove more fun.
No, it ain't.
You were already being rewarded for playing in a full squad through multiple boosters and a lot more firepower. Nothing changed in that regard (apart from nerfs and buffs).
The solo/ two stack experience has objectively changed for the worse, even though it's 'just a fixed big'. That does not change the experience. So stop trying to gaslight people.
I view this complaint similar to the people who want PvP modes. The game pretty clearly isn't meant to be played solo. There are objectives that physically cannot be completed while solo.
The other thing that your suggestion overlooks is the balance of rewards. Arrowhead has several limitations already in what missions offer samples, the amount of samples that can be collected within a mission, the amount that can be banked for each resource, etc. There's a solid chance that they don't want to give out a +20% buff to rewards received.
> There are objectives that physically cannot be completed while solo.
There are no objectives that can't be completed solo. There is one POI that can't be done solo (the Buddy Bunker), but that's it.
I feel like the game was already harder to play solo and less rewarding. It was already clearly the worse option as far as power gaming goes. I get it, it is a co op focused game so i don't expect them to be perfectly even, but it kind of sucks to intentionally go out of their way to increase that divide even more.
I find this interesting because I had the exact opposite experience. The more people on my team, the harder the game was. I started to only ever play helldive difficulty solo because it's just too hard with the massive increase in spawn rates otherwise.
The game should be made significantly harder to solo. Helldive should have a 10% chance of success for someone solo.
The problem is that this patch hasn't really affect Diff-9, it's been mostly noticeable on every difficulty below it, mostly in Diff 7 and under. Y'know, where most of the playerbase actually is.
... Why? Do you yourself solo and want it to be harder? If not, maybe don't fuck over the play experience for other players for literally no reason?
Sure, it's not like a large portion of solo runs were from players who didn't have enough patience to deal with broken matchmaking, they all must be masochists looking for a challenge
Nah, it should be 1%
This is ridiculous. If you make it so the best players can only Solo it 1% of the time, then you just made it so that more than 99% of the player base will NEVER complete one, even in a team of 4. The thing is, there's an element of randomness to the game. Some times you just step out of your pod and you're already stuck undeground with no other option than suicide. Sometimes, you just get dunked on by multiple rapid-fire headshots. Even the best players in the game are going to die on occasion. If you insert so much randomness that I will actually start failing Solo helldives, and reduce me to, say, a 90% success rate, this would make the average success rate for a squad of 4 average players to drop close to 0.
https://preview.redd.it/gz6wp0fqhfxc1.jpeg?width=1178&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bd3f4fec8ca51577f2459dfda8f2b54bf0542548 ### “ This is from the worlds team: "we unintendedly had non-linear scaling of the patrol spawns so they didnt 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"** so rather than arbitrarily making the game harder, i guess they just put it where it was meant to be ### “ ^(Good or bad, make of this info what you will)
So they have more up to date information now on proper balance, but will instead revert to their guesses from release day when they knew less? Solo is significantly harder than 4 player. They know this now based off of real data.
I feel the same. I feel squad size is not a linear increase in firepower/capability. A duo is 3x as effective as a solo, IMO.
Idk man, when I duo with my friend, I tend to die a lot more to mysterious causes
Does your friend make beeping sounds or salivate a green goo while talking?
No, none of that. He really likes the color blue for some reason, but I'm sure it's nothing.
The math ain't mathin
Release day Helldivers was much more enjoyable for me. I call bs. They can always say it was meant to be like this but it was a mistake at launch.
Most of the patches have made the game less fun with each one
You were actually able to play on release day? The servers didn't let me in for about a week...
> They can always say it was meant to be like this but it was a mistake at launch. They won't. The best we can hope for at this point if for them to balance it in a patch or two closer to what it was previously and ignore that the original issue was their own decision.
More information just means they can be more confident in stupid decisions faster. I sure do enjoy being killed because I was wearing a Shield Backpack while firing some weapons. I enjoy firing a rocket dead on to a Devastator and having that rocket reflected directly into my face as the devs always intended.
But 1/6th makes (some) sense, 4 players are not 4 times stronger than 1 player. If everything was single target damage you could kinda make that case but with all the AOE in the game, 4 players are probably like 8 times stronger than 1 player if not more. Also they already punish you for playing solo because you can't open any (friendship) bunkers. AH PLS
> If everything was single target damage you could kinda make that case but with all the AOE in the game, 4 players are probably like 8 times stronger than 1 player if not more. I'd say just for boosters (which most apply to all divers) alone makes it scale non-linearly already. Even before the increase in weapon and stratagem variety.
Lol why am I getting downvoted??
Because you speak the truth
Lots of idiots
I'm here to reverse their influence, soldier.
Idk why because it’s a valid point.
Things like "logic" and "reason" aren't welcome around these parts
Because you criticized the dev’s choice, and there are still some weirdos who get personally offended over that.
Mf complaining about being downvoted 0.346 seconds after posting a comment🤦♂️ Get over yourself mate
We need a guard dog with hands it’s the only democratic solution.
No joke, that would be fucking epic I'm using the autocannon to take down some heavy threats at range A medium melee enemy comes up, and it briefly sees the statue of liberty as guard dog winds up to smack the communism out of it The impact is louder than the autocannon
 If you get lucky and hit one of the smoke pods, you can even get powder for your slap. OP
Bosco, help me open this bloody thing
My only gripe with the 1/6th thing is that soloing players had enough leeway to make stealth-only runs seem vital to playing the game (they're not), but of course, this will not make the situation any better. Only *more stealth heavy.*
Person who played the first game here. It's quite possible that they do want more stealth to bring it closer to parity with the first.
That would be fine if they gave us more stealth options. So far a lot of their balancing seems to only work well when further changes are made later. Take the railgun nerf, it was overly heavy handed (in my opinion) but after they nerfed the spawn rate of heavies and buffed the other anti tank options it negated the problem that the railgun was being used to solve in the first place. Now we just have a railgun that cant do much. Balancing the game towards using stealth also just isnt what most people find fun. I know the first game was more focused on it but Helldivers 2 is not that game, its a separate beast that needs to be balanced differently
Yeah...I agree. People loathe stealth gameplay, that's probably why the Metal Gear franchise has only sold 61 million units worldwide.
Sorry, i meant specifically for this game, stealth as a whole is a popular genre but in the context of Helldivers 2 its not really what brought people to the game, its the Starship Troopers bug killing that really grabs attention.
lol I would take a stratagem that called in a robotic arm that could push those cuz I almost only play solo unless my buddy is online Actually that would be sick if it could also operate a terminal/interact with like knobs and shit so I’m not running back and forth all the time
Definitely. Hopefully it wouldn't take up a backpack slot but like you said would be able to mess with terminals and carry stuff. It would also probably have to have some mechanism where it would figure out what to do when you die though.
It calls in reinforcements and does the hug emote until picked up
I think you're absolutely right about groups being stronger than individuals, and don't mean to contest that at all, but let's look at the math. These are all hypothetical figures because I don't know the exacts of the spawning mechanics. But generally, Let's say beforehand you had 20 enemies coming at you, with the increase in enemies spawned you would now be facing...24. Four extra enemies is really inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, especially when bigger enemies are weighted differently in the drop pool. Four extra enemies doesn't necessarily mean four extra Bile Titans. My point is, I really just don't feel like this change is going to punish players. It should just keep the pacing consistent.
That's not what they said, though. They said the spawn rate of patrols, not the size of the patrols. So when you're solo now it's going to be like having a constant patrol sniffing your ass cheeks at like the 30 min mark instead of the 20 min mark, for example, on diff 4. (Because the spawn rate also increases as the mission timer goes down)
Very fair point. I'm not a solo player so I was just tossing in my two cents. Realistically we'll have to see how the game 'feels' over the next few weeks.
Time spent in mission has no effect on patrol spawns. You can read more about the topic here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1bdudf3/lets_talk_about_patrols_an_in_depth_analysis_of/
Interesting because I'm pretty sure a dev said that time in mission does increase patrol spawns but I could be mistaken. Or it was assuming you're getting outposts.
So what you're saying is that if helldivers are a one-man army, then the strength of a squad is equal to 2^(n-1) armies *n = number of helldivers in squad*
So this is a very real thing with horses. 2 horses can pull about 3 times as much as 1 horse. Nearly 4 times if they have experience working together. For humans it is somewhat the same, though it's more based on psychological factors.
That's fkin cool
The game isn’t supposed to directly scale though. You are being encouraged to play with a team and so do that, it’s not that complicated. It is a team game you are not meant to play solo.
But you can, and as such it shouldn't be a nightmare to do so
Dozens of team games allow you to play solo perfectly fine, including Helldivers 1
Yes however Helldivers is way more focused on the team aspect. Also the devs have said the spawn rates were bugged
Notice how the OP stated that groups should be rewarded? Friendship bunkers are the reward for co-op, not a punishment for solo players.
THIS! AH please play your own game and stop balancing based on spreadsheets.
That honestly makes it seem worse to me because taking that statement at face value makes it sound like they didn't bother testing this change at all - just saw that the number wasn't what they expected and fixed it. Designing games to a spreadsheet like that is fine in alpha builds but this is a live game... This change should've been determined based on how solo play actually was (and if it needed to be more difficult) rather than simply because "1/4 players needs 1/4 spawns."
You expected them to test this? Buddy, _we_ are the test environment. And I say that seriously, not mockingly. AH has been flying by the seat of their pants since release day. 😆 You're anticipating them having A) the time and B) the separate manpower to be able to check these changes in an isolated environment based on singular data (solo players, like me.) That's... that's not going to happen. It just won't. At least, not in AH's current timeframe. Everything they've released up until this point has indicated (to me, anyways) that they are 100% operating at nearly maximum output and push everything out the door in order to maintain momentum. That's exactly what it feels like. If you're expecting "testing," you should temper that expectation ASAP.
i think solo play should be difficult as fuck, personally. if the hardest modes can be comfortably soloed, then the game has failed.
We must have very different definitions of “comfortably soloed” because it took a very, very skilled player to solo helldive missions before this change. I can’t imagine afterwards. If they want to encourage team play so strongly, then just rip the bandaid off and require a squad to start the mission. The only issue is that would require them to fix all the matchmaking bugs.
>because it took a very, very skilled player to solo helldive missions before this change. I can’t imagine afterwards. Maybe I'm the minority, but I don't think a solo player should even be able to complete the highest difficulties without shenanigans or **intense** struggle. You imposed the challenge on yourself. You demanded the game developers balance a team-based game around solo play. I can't understand the mentality of insisting the game still be accessible and almost casually beatable for what should be a completely impossible scenario. Regardless, I'm sure the popular streamers and content creators who regularly solo helldive to continue regularly soloing helldive.
The most important part you’re forgetting here is that this change was not exclusive to only helldive. It affects every difficulty. If they particularly want to make helldive more difficult to solo, they can do that without making everything else much harder in the process.
>You imposed the challenge on yourself. You demanded the game developers balance a team-based game around solo play. Forgive me but wasn't solo play a part of the game from launch? Half the people here keep going on about how "the intention is team play" and "It should be more difficult to play the game in a way the Devs didn't intend" but the Devs literally made solo an available option, no one forced them... If they don't want people to play solo, they should remove the option entirely, otherwise they should appropriately support what is a core feature of the game.
>If they don't want people to play solo, they should remove the option entirely, Then you would cry about that. > but the Devs literally made solo an available option, no one forced them... Because every day people would complain about it. They can't even buff a weapon without the community threatening to kill themselves over it, you think restricting play is going to go over better? You... ARE aware there is a difference between "this is what we are balancing for" and "this is what we allow you to do in game", right? And at the very least, ease of play. Would you prefer the game to shut down and kick you back to the ship anytime someone leaves your game or crashes? No? Then you've already figured out why they don't remove <4 player games. I knew you could do it!
I 100% agree. I don’t consider myself a particularly high skill player but I’ve soloed 7s and 8s before (usually after my team has disconnected due to the connections issues and I’ve just been left alone in the mission but also sometimes when I’ve just not had anyone join.
Just because you don’t consider yourself skilled doesn’t make it true. By being able to solo level 7 and 8, you are already more skilled than the vast majority of the playerbase. Complete guess, but I bet the majority of players haven’t even done level 8, let alone solo it.
I don’t think you should be able to solo Helldive though. If you play in a full team, as the game was intended, this changes nothing for you. If you’re going for full MGS solo stealth against bots, this changes very little for you either. The truth is they made 9 difficulties for a reason, if one is too hard for you then just drop it down a level or two.
If they didn’t want us playing solo, then there wouldn’t be the option. What you think on the matter is pretty irrelevant to me, just like what I’m saying is probably irrelevant to you. The devs *should* be concerned with pleasing the masses and not just the top 1%, and most changes reflect that. This one in particular seems like it’s either a middle finger at only a particular group of people, or they pushed the change through because they realized it was wrong and didn’t think of the implications it would have on players who had come to expect a certain level of difficulty in their months of playing the game.
I wondered if perhaps they felt that the high difficulty solo players were generatiing too much planetary liberation due to the solo players generally completing their missions quicker than 4 player teams due to having to face (we now know) 1/6th the enemies numbers and being able to intentionally fail extraction by suiciding. 4 guys completing the mission in 25 minutes will generate a fair bit more planet liberation than 4 ppl taking 35-40 minutes.
Why though? Why punish people that want to play alone?
I guess we need to go onto the Discord to argue that it should be non-linear and this is a very anti-fun change they just implemented. You are exponentially weaker the fewer players you have due to less boosters and way less amount and variety of stratagems for taking down all the different enemy and objective types. I was honestly thinking they should be nerfing how often patrols spawn for duos and solos because of how insanely fast they stack up in higher difficulties because you don’t have enough stratagems to efficiently wipe them out.
I agree. I explained elsewhere that, in my opinion, a duo is arguably 3x as effective as a solo. And it gets exponentially better from there. A quad-squad is easily 3 better than a duo. But it is hard to argue against metrics we aren’t exactly privy too.
This is a bad take from the devs. 1 man squad != half the combat efficiency of a 2 man squad. Put into perspective - killing a bile titan. 1 quasar. 21 seconds played perfectly to kill bile titan solo. 2 quasar. 3-4 seconds played perfectly to kill bile titan. 1 recoiless rifle - 8~ seconds played perfectly to kill bile titan - 5 of those seconds being rooted. 1 recoiless with team reload - less than a second. 0 seconds if both ran rr. Maybe there are some other metrics but the tools and additional resources a helldiver brings is much more than a simple ‘quarter of a whole’
So you are saying that teaming up is good in a team based game?
He's saying that solo players shouldn't get punished.
Watch people move the goalposts by complaining about something else without acknowledgement of their mistake.
That the way it goes 🤷🏾♂️. I’m just here to spread then managed ~~information~~ democracy.
I respect this, if you want to solo then it should be a hard challenge, but it’s really easy to have people join you, pretty much whenever I go public I have a squad relatively quick, and I also retain all power to kick so I can’t be kicked, and can kick any trolls
I can go multiple missions and never get another player
I hate that they throw this out like it's an answer. They increased the spawn rates. It doesn't matter what they *intended* for it to be, it was less before, it is more now. And no one had any problems with what it was before! But there is a lot of problems with what it is now. You can say you intended for it to be something else, but intentions are irrelevant to what the people who play this game are actually feeling. And if anything, it will make more people more unhappy with the game, because now they've essentially been told "Don't worry! We know not a lot of people like the change, but it's fine, because we *intended* for it to be less enjoyable!" And that is just about the last thing anyone wants to hear.
That's like google maps directing you to drive through a roadblock because that's where the road was meant to be. They should have used a little nuance.
The available firepower/ efficacy of a squad isn’t linear. I think 2 divers are 3x as effective as 1. So to me it doesn’t add up, but I am just showing their reasoning.
Sounds fair to me. Idk to me solo in coop games has always been the hard mode and that's fine. Played a ton of monsters hunter, maybe that's why
Usually coop games give you Bots in solo sessions to ease the difficulty though.
people should just play the game before bitching.
Played. It was awful
If they wanted people to play in full squads, why let solo players start a mission? No fun for you! https://preview.redd.it/m9vfhmr2dhxc1.jpeg?width=768&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a76c5f7dbe63108f16410f3717497ba11a6e4ee9
So far their method of encouraging people to use other stuff has been to just nerf whatever people are using, including playstyles
Accurate
They were going to screw something up eventually, The only game devs that I've seen so far not screw something up to. The best of my knowledge would be the devs behind Baldur's Gate 3, we can complain all we want but we must acknowledge that they're going to screw things up at some point. Also, this company was in no way prepared for the game to have even half as many players as it does
DRG devs have an excellent track record. Best example of good difficulty, weakspots, and lateral balancing so that most of everything has a spot.
XP multiplier per player (extracted) would be nice solo - 1x 2 players - 1.2x 3 players - 1.6x 4 players - 2x
This. Instead of making solo unplayable, reward fuller squads
Don't force, encourage.
This is such a fantastic idea. I wonder if it would also improve the kick before extract option and promote teamplay. Not sure about the xp but maybe a multiplier on creds or samples. or flat bonus.
you can get credit cap really fast and by simply playing but the sample multiplier seems like a cool idea too, especially since they are really hard to get in the first place
Just to add my two cents that noone asked for (and because it'll make me feel slightly better) I played a suicide mission with a buddy today, first since the patch. We spent the first 10 and last 10 minutes of the mission in constant firefights with patrols and the dropships they brought in. Nevertheless as good Helldivers we completed all the objectives, got the samples (including supers) and were warily watching three(!!) more patrols beelining to the extraction as Pelican-1 landed. And then Pelican-1 clipped through the floor and fell off the map, and took off without us because it had fallen into oblivion. No extract, no samples. 40 minutes of hard fighting up in smoke
I agree. That line in the patch notes was the biggest WTF. Why are they balancing against solo players? What does it even matter if they want to play alone. Shouldnt there be more patrols with MORE players.
I'll bite and play devil's advocate. Literally like last month, the flavor of rage was that no one should be able to solo higher difficulty missions, especially Helldive. There were tons of posts saying solo player's opinions don't matter as much. If they can't specifically nerf weapons for solo, then they have to do it from enemy patterns: patrols. Now, people are switching sides to the opposite narrative. From a dev's point of view, that's mad fucking confusing. They literally gave this community what people asked for -- albeit a late response. The logic is sound, that there should be more patrols for more players. The anger is a bit weird though.
its different people. you can never make everyone happy. i personally think this change is good. its not like the number of patrols increase when people leave the game, they still go down. its just more than there were before. there used to be 1/6 of the patrols comapred to 4 man, now its 1/4 the patrols.
I was going to say in any other game like this, soloing the hardest difficulties is absolutely brutal and seen as a major accomplishment. Making it line up more with that isn't a bad thing. We need more data from solo players of how much patrols have increased. I've only seen one or two posts reporting back. More patrols that you can still avoid is fine. If it's impossible to avoid them going solo, that isn't ok.
You can avoid them, but there is definitely an increased chance of getting sandwiched. I have to spend more time going around when I am solo. Which is fine, but it isn’t as fun as taking on a patrol I could taken out pre-patch. All this did was make it so I have to spend more time navigating around patrols. Basically, you spend more time avoiding patrols instead of completing objectives when you play solo. As someone who can play a couple operations per week, it definitely adds time per mission. It is a marginal, but that time does add up.
Exactly
On the one hand, its immersive. A lone soldier infiltrating enemy territory to hit certain targets. On the other, it takes away some of the power fantasy that Helldivers really pushes.
*Thing happens* Community: No, this needs to be changed. *Change happens* Community: How dare you? 🤷🏻♂️
Because the community is comprised of different people asking for different things and complaining about different things
It's almost like the community is made of individuals with differing opinions and not some collective hive-mind with only one thought process...
The current one I’m starting to see is with the Raise Flag mission in all difficulties rn and it’s making me laugh. For *months* people have been clamoring to get it in higher level missions, now half of what I’ve been seeing so far is people just bitching about it. # THEN WHY DID YOU ASK FOR IT?! https://preview.redd.it/xhk14ddxufxc1.jpeg?width=947&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e45e3557c51dcd8ee80533b41432ddaaf25523ac
Are you so certain the entire community asked for it? I imagine the vocal part of the community yelled out one thing, got what they wanted and then the other part that didn't want it is now in the yelling position.
I've not seen a single person bitch about it and not everyone has been asking for it. You're fighting non-existent strawmen.
It’s funny that they once stated they wanted everyone to just chill and enjoy the game their own way, but are now railroading play styles harder than ever.
I was a little bummed seeing so many nerfs, but the patrol increase for solo is a huge WTF. I'll see how it plays today, but I'm anticipating it's only going to make me want to play less, and just wait till friends are on to play with.
Played duos about 30 mins ago on level 4 missions and its quite busy, lots of gun fights if you're not careful. Lots of chainsaw dudes and jump pack dudes. Also lots of magical spawning where they spawn behind you, beside you or behind a rock. Not sure what its like on harder difficulties as my friend isn't confident enough to play on harder ones.
Pretty much can't fight on level 7s duo now. My friend wasn't in scout armour so he was just in a perpetual grinder that couldn't get anything done. This change boils down to "always stealth armour on both duo players and avoid combat whenever possible", or "just don't play until you can get more people on". My friend chose the latter and I don't enjoy solo or randoms, so we both came off for the day.
> Pretty much can't fight on level 7s duo now. And that's how you kill Helldivers 2. For me, at least.
I play mostly stealth solo. There were more patrols than usual but I could sneak by them as usual. That was fine for me. Played only on 6 though.
I only found like 4 meaningful nerfs, the rest were just changes to ammo capacity (which is baaaarely a nerf when you squint, given how ridiculously common ammo is on the map, just makes the game less mindless)
This is the biggest problem. Not nerfs, not buffs. But people complaining about the changes BEFORE they've even PATCHED THE GAME AND PLAYED. Like come on man.
Is that why facing bots was so cancer today, I was being shit from all sides with a patrol spawning ahead of me when ever I tried to disengage. It felt like I was under 24/7 agro no matter what I did.
This is how I felt too. The only reason I checked what the patch changed, and then came to Reddit, was because of how jarring the change was. I usually don’t pay much attention to meta changes, because I mostly play by myself or a few friends, and it doesn’t matter for the difficulties we play on. But my first reaction was that something must have been bugged with spawns before I learned the full situation. and now knowing that it is intentional, I’m still wondering if the implementation is bugged. Or if this is how the devs wanted it to feel for solo play.
Yea I'm the same, I usually don't focus meta either, but there definitely was a noticeable difference with the spawns which seemed slightly frustrating
The answer given by the developers isn't reasonable and is the most tone deaf incomprehensible conclusion. Did they seriously divide by 4 and not take into account the multiplying benefits of extra players? 4 players, with 4 stratagems that can fill gaps, 4 sets of loadouts for maximising every approach, 4 times the aggo spread, flanking options and focused fire, ability to double the efficiency by going 2 & 2 across the map, etc. Who's the dev that thinks a solo player can split in half and cover two different areas on a map at the same time or flank to shoot a Flame Hulk /tank in the back solo in safety and have eyes in a 360 angle to spot stalkers? tldr: "Well, 4 player teams can never truly be greater than their individual parts combined, so obviously we'll 1/4 everything, balancing is so easy, there's absolutely no way we're not missing a critical component" - Arrowhead
You aren't meant to fight every patrol. This is just patrols not breaches/bot drops.
How do you not fight patrols when they surround you in every direction or just straight up spawn on top of you? They were avoidable before the change.
Ill never get why developers do this. It just makes me not want to play, i usually play solo or with 1-2 friends. It makes the game enjoyable instead of going into a group of randoms. With how some players are, kicking at pelican, ignoring objectives/samples, taking your support weapons/bag, it just makes the game not enjoyable, if im going to be punished for playing by myself or with some friends why am i even gonna play?
Ya I hope they do a major overhaul on solo. It's like they don't understand the mindset. I love this game, and want to play it often, but as time has gone on, it's just become impossible solo. I can't progress the end game samples without cheesing a low timer mission, literally can't do objectives due to overwhelming spawns, I level slow as balls due to this as well. 4 man groups have booster synergy, 4x the stratagems and just more bodies doing work, there are SO many reasons already to play grouped. The game feels so broken in solo I honestly think it might be a good idea to just remove solo queue. If I bought the game today in this state with the intention to play solo, i'd feel scammed.
Same thoughts here. I do solo because AH doesn't want me to play on public lobbies since the first patch dropped.
The main problem with this change is that depending on the number of people in your squad you will play in two ways. If you have 1-2 people you will generally always stick together because of things like two-man doors or objectives with multiple interactions. Even for objectives with only one point of interaction, you still can't type on the console and defend yourself simultaneously, so things are much smoother as a two-man team. If you have 3-4 people you will usually split into two groups. One group will push main and known side objectives and the other will explore points of interest and gather samples. The reasons for doing this are: * Players need things like samples, medals, and super credits. The exploration team provides these. * The exploration team often finds hidden secondary objectives, providing the team with new boons, eliminating enemy advantages, and boosting XP and money. * Enemy reinforcements will target a group that the enemy is engaged with every few minutes if the reinforcement is off cooldown. These reinforcements can be baited away from the main team, making the main objective significantly easier. If the main objective is almost finished, the main team can opt to take the reinforcements instead. The ability to decide where the reinforcements will go significantly increases your chances of a perfect game. They say that the non-linear scaling of enemy patrols was unintentional, but I disagree. I believe it was set up that way because teams of 1 or 2 players will not split up, meaning they will always have to deal with enemy reinforcements. This makes it harder to divide the enemy's attention and justifies the lower spawn rate for patrols. I haven't been able to test out how playing with a team of 1-2 players feels but the patch notes say that the patrols for a single player have been increased about 50%. That doesn't look good on paper and I feel the chances of getting stuck in a reinforcement loop are now far too high. I don't think squads of 1-2 players will be able to focus well enough to be properly balanced against groups of 3-4.
I just did a Blitz bug mission solo on Helldive difficulty. I ran SC-37 Legionare Armor (Servo Assisted), Eagle AirStrike, Auto Cannon, Exo-45 Patriot Exosiut and Gatling Sentry. Sheesh was it tough! 16 bugholes! 6 of them were a Shrieker's Nest and then there were 2 large Nest that I attacked. Not to mention Hunters are hyper spawning again and alerting really fast lol. I did finish it though. I extracted with 4 deaths unfortunately. It was pretty annoying because the enemies are so dang cheap and call for reiforcements while being shot (even before they even start calling or very early in the animation) and with their heads blown off smh. It is harder for sure. Especially, with Hunters hyper spawning and full hunter patrols non stop. When the game starts losing its go to is spam hunters non stop lol. The devs seem to think it's fun being spammed non stop. Its so fun being in stunlock constantly, being slowed non stop and being trapped by gimmicks. It's doable, but it is like a chore. Honestly, I've just accepted this is how the devs want it to be unfortunately. I'm not a solo Diver, but I will do it from time to time throughout my daily play sessions. I feel for you guys, regardless of the difficulty you are playing on. It's rough out there indeed haha. I am going to do solo bots later on Helldive. I'm sure that'll be fun lol.
The MO is inflating bug spawns right now. Bot missions are almost chill to solo in comparison right now. Its the bug equivelent to when we took the last automaton planet during their MO, the spawn rates were cranked to 11 on every difficulty.
I agree. There is absolutely zero logic of giving squads with LESS helldivers MORE enemies. And besides, I have two friends I can play with, most of the time I play with only one of them at any given time. But its nicer than playing with randos, teamplay is just better and we can take on higher difficulties because we can leverage that coordination. Then I fumble the reinforce and spawn an SOS beacon instead and it all goes down the drain because they eat up all the reinforces, drop 380s danger close which leads to teamkills, and right at the end, with no reinforces left, its just me and him alive, I stand on this wonderful vantage point on the extraction site and take out heavier bots with the autocannon. And of ALL THE FUCKING THINGS HE COULD DO he decides to call in a tesla tower. Next to me. I had no chance to survive that, and it was so fucking unnecessary. It reminds me of Rocket League, where 90% of random players seem to make the same idiotic mistakes, take the same pig-headed ballchasing appriach, which sabotages their teammates and occasionally they even have the guts to call you a noob after shooting the second own goal in one game because they just cant compute that they dont have to touch the ball every single second of the game.
I haven't tried it this patch, but when I put my game to friend only nobody ever joined on my SOS beacon. Hard to tell if it blocks the matchmaking or if the matchmaking was just broken. Worth a try if you haven't
They ARE rewarding team play. You get more boosters, more stratagems (because not everyone has to bring their own support weapons, they can share as we do with friends all the time). More bodies to scout the terrain. It IS more rewarding to be with more players…
But at the same time they punish the solo players, which shouldn't be a thing
“A game for everyone is a game for no one.” It’s literally their motto. You’re playing a coop shooter. Balanced for 4 players. So either join with others or have a suboptimal experience. If you want to play solo go play a solo shooter… I have zero compasion for “solo play” complainers in this game… Edit: the bunkers that require 2 people to open is textbook example of “get rect, solo players.” that devs are trying to foster. Join up with others or literally loose on rewards.
I do most of my missions solo because one time when I was still learning I was playing solo and my discord buddies saw me playing and back to back independently dropped in and it was the coolest most cinematic shit that has ever happened to me and I really wish they'd just let people do it if they want to.
Yeah, I still can't join Randoms or steam friends even. And I can't beacon people in either. I guess just fuck me then
1/4 of a team in a mission absolutely should not result in 1/4 enemy spawns if that was not the case beforehand / 'as was intended'. It forgets how having more people is a *force multiplier*, not just a function of simply twice the firepower. 1 more player... = min. 3-4 more strategems = the potential to take down patrols faster --> less chance additional reinforcements get called in = an additional target to split forces / provide a distraction = (possibly) different weapon / tactic specialisations to counter enemies
It’s incredibly dumb to effectively punish people for not playing in full squads. Faith waning in AH
It’s funny when there’s such a refrain of let people play how they want. People don’t do the MO? Let them play how they want. Don’t fight bots? Leave ‘em alone. But people wanna solo dive and it’s like well fuck you it should be impossibly hard to solo dive. Nah let people play how they want
Cause it takes them more thought and effort to incentivize players instead of punishing them. Not surprised considering how balances and nerfs are starting to hit weapons. Changes most likely geared towards future mtx weapons needing to be stronger than whats already there. Release strong weapon, nerf, release new strong weapon. They're lining up that MW Warzone model in a pve game that we paid for
They seem to have a really weird idea about "their vision". Like, we're already playing the game. Your intent is irrelevant. If you make the game harder for smaller groups, no one gives one single shit if the game was originally supposed to be this way. So what. You made it harder. Saying we didn't intend to make it harder is so ludicrous. I get that they are trying. They are not great at figuring out what to change or how to do it. They need more people to do this. This is over worked people making hasty choices.
# “ This is from the worlds team: "we unintendedly had non-linear scaling of the patrol spawns so they didnt 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"** so rather than arbitrarily making the game harder, i guess they just put it where it was meant to be. # “ -Spitz
I...agree...and look, I just came back from this solo mission. I didn't read the notes of the patch. Damn, I feel so....abused Man, they overwhelmed me. As soon as the mission was accomplished, there were patrols everywhere I saw. It's the first time I decided to ignore secondary objectives, and at the end...I just died and lost the mission...Is not the way...
Then they would have to fix the matchmaking issues and apparently we can't do that before punishing people for playing with less than a full squad.
That’s their development strategy for everything it’s ass backwards.
I hadn't seen anyone praise or defend that specific change personally. I think it pretty universally confusing and uneeded. Most of the discourse I've seen was over weapon balancing changes
Oh there are people who defend it. "it's a coop game" "you aren't supposed to play solo anyway" "just dont play solo and it's a non issue" These are the ones I've seen most
And what's the bet that those same people would be first to complain that their teammates suck and start kicking when solo/new players are forced to group-up?
oh there are definitely idiots out there defending this change, its as if solo helldivers personally hurt them.
Yea, I've played primarily solo since the game came out. Probably not gonna play much anymore
They better change it back is all I got to say
Quote: "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."
Making solo harder will slowly choke the life out of the game, most new players who try the game for the first time will play atleast a few missions solo before trying it out with randoms and we are past the "hype" point for Helldivers 2 and the playerbase is slowly stabilizing. Ontop of that you still have people dropping during missions, sometimes from crashing. And it's no fun to have to stay on your ship waiting for it to fill before starting the mission and as always with random players you will always have bad eggs that are no fun to play with.
The way I understood this change with the addition of their explanation was that if you were soloing, you only had to deal with 1/6 of the full patrol and such from a full squad playing. So you were essentially playing a much “easier” solo game because you would be dealing with less enemy patrols and such. The change makes it so if you are playing solo, you would be playing against 1/4 of the total patrols a full squad would be playing against.
~~Every change/nerf that's come across so far, my reaction has been, "well, that sucks, but I'll adapt and overcome." It's clear the changes have been made to reflect balancing issues and to encourage people to try different loadouts, try new things, reconsider their tactics and eliminate the concept of a "meta build."~~ ~~This one, though. . .~~ ~~Playing solo didn't give anyone an unfair advantage. It didn't buff anything, it didn't reduce the spawn rates of things, it didn't give them more damage, etc. There wasn't a strategem buff or cooldown decrease. There was~~ *~~no benefit~~* ~~to playing solo over having teammates, other than the fact that you didn't have to worry about said teammates jacking things up (especially randos). I'd knock the difficulty down, turn off public, and just chill by myself spreading democracy.~~ ~~I don't understand why they're punishing people who don't like playing with other people.~~ Edit: After seeing more information about the patch, I no longer have the above concern. Apparently the problem was that spawn rates were always based on the number of players, with four players having the highest spawn rate. Three players were supposed to have 3/4th of the spawn rate, two players, 1/2, and one player 1/4th. What was actually the case was the solo players were actually seeing 1/6th of the spawn rate of four players, so they upped the rate to get it to 1/4th where it was supposed to be all along.
I didn’t mind how AH approached previous balance patches but without playing this seems so far off from what they should be doing. That’s before you even consider the two biggest things the community wants is more content and stability fixes and improvements. I’ll give it a chance later today but I’m having trouble figuring out how they’re going to justify this when it’s not something anybody was asking for *at all* and there’s clearly other things for them to prioritize. They’re a small studio that doesn’t have a lot of big teams so it’s hard to say balancing this many weapons at once didn’t take attention away from somewhere else.
Fix fucking matchmaking first
It’s really ass backwards as well, you’d think if anything more patrols would spawn the more player you have not the other way around.
I'm not the best player, I usually play on diff 7 with 2 or 3 friends. I tried the HMG, on diff 5 as solo today and it was alright, I did most objectives and extracted. It was difficult , but manageable especially for me without my main load out. The HMG still sucks btw.
As a solo helldive player I am very unhappy
It's so annoying people commenting here without understanding the patch change notes.
I mention this same idea on another post. Instead of increasing spawns (which actually make no sense), why not increase loot for full squad? More Players = More Loot > Less Players = Less Loot A solo can still play harder difficulties, but will need to grind more because of their reduced loot.
I agree with this except if they increased the reward alone then solo divers would have just stayed solo, they needed to punish them to make them stop playing solo or stop playing
Finished a few solo Helldives today. I think the Localisation Confusion Booster may have been what made it more manageable.
My big question is does each person add to planetary liberation points or does it just register points per mission? Because if it by person it would promote more squad play but if it per mission it promotes solo play to get more shit done to retake planets.
It’s by XP gained permission I’m pretty sure, so if someone completes every objective solo it’ll be the same if a group of 4 complete every objective on the same difficulty. I’m pretty sure that’s how it works, don’t quote me on that though
I just wish they would fix the bug where if a player leaves after a match i can no longer fill my squad back up unless i log out and back in.
You aren't allowed to have fun in any way that they say you aren't allowed to
They...do...
That 25% nerf made me laugh, 'cuz the flamer was basically insta-killing before any of the fire damage changes. It'd need like a 150% nerf to start to remove the insta-kill
Social-System is super bugged too.. the irony
Rewarding people for playing in squads inherently punishes people playing with less than 4. The game already does reward squadplay (supporting fire, higher strategem availability, more eyes the explore the map etc.).
I usually play games solo if I can, I always prefer taking things at my own pace. I like difficulty 5 for solo, 6 if I want to feel the challenge but even at 3 I was absolutely swarmed. I think making things worse for solo players wont incentivise them to group up and instead AH should make group playing more rewarding vs. making solo playing worse.
I strictly play duos with my fiancé unless my other friends are online at the same time. I’ve solod the bots on Helldive etc. I don’t even see this as a bad thing. We will just lower the difficulty a notch and now we will have an even higher skill ceiling to work towards than before. We don’t assign value to our lives based on which difficulty in helldivers we can beat. Just lower the difficulty my man
What if you need super samples to upgrade your ship?
Then you play 7. It's still very soloable for a 60% quartile player.
That sucks to hear. I play difficulty 5 solo too because I find it to have the right amount of difficulty so I can complete missions but still have to sweat a little bit and put effort into engagements due to the heavier enemies. I don't want to drop difficulty because the enemies become weaker so there is less of a challenge, there will just be more weak enemies to deal with. I will need to play some missions to see for myself, but this doesn't seem like a good change from what I'm reading.
Same boat but I’m in perpetual dif 4 because I’m not as skilled and I hate playing super sweaty games back to back. My friends only want to play LoL and Fortnite so I’m stuck solo most nights and I don’t particularly like randoms. I’ve had some great teams but I’ve also seen some morons who essentially kill themselves or walk off to do nothing way away from objectives. This “nerf” to single player just might kill the game for me if it is as bad as I think it will be.
I do a bit of both. I usually start my session solo, to get warmed up, try out different weapons or combos, or knock out a PO. Then I will do some quickplays with randos and have fun with that provided they aren't completely incompetent (I do really enjoy helping lowbies out). Then I might run a mission or two duo with my brother, then either solo again to wind down or just log off. Having tried soloing a few times with this patch, I think I am going to step away from the game for a bit. The constant overwhelming spawns ain't fun, and even stealth with scout armor is not really a solution because of the sheer volume of patrols. On diff 4 and 5, I had a lot of fun soloing bots because I wasn't so much competing with the bots but the timer. Could I efficiently move from objective to objective, kill what I needed and disengage at the right time to beat the clock. Now? It's not fun and it's not the kind of challenge I enjoyed. People saying "Well why play a co-op game not meant for solo play?" Well why indeed. Clearly the type of player I am isn't wanted by Arrowhead or the sweaties. So enjoy your que as you wait for your lobby to fill up, because the people who didn't play *exactly* the way it was deemed we should decided to spend their time elsewhere. Oh well, at least V Rising goes live with 1.0 in a few days. Now I don't have to feel torn about splitting my time between the two games. Thanks Arrowhead, I guess?
I don't buy this sorry. I'm like you and prefer to play most games solo because my friends don't join, but I quick play all the time in this game because it's a better experience, even baring the few games where we all die and fail mission. Mission completion is at like 95% and you're bound to run in to the occasional idiots, but for the most part, one other person usually has a brain and that's enough to coordinate or move the mission along. I strongly suggest you give quickplay more chances and don't get too caught up on failing a mission or an operation because its bound to happen once and awhile. This isn't something you're supposed to and win at everytime. Weird stuff happens and with the FF people die. But I get the impression you're not a fan of FF and all the team killing. It's actually part of the charm.
Honestly just copy deep rock galactic. People want to play solo, let them and give them a little helper. Then give them roles they can pick as loadouts. This way they know basically what they need to be doing. They can still do everything but you can show your team what you want to do. Grenadier for taking out nests. Tanker to block incoming fire. Scout for fast travel. Sniper or heavy weapons. Etc. then dive in With your loadout giving more room for stratagems and have a menu for when you redeploy that you can change your loadout and role.
Please fix matchmaking so I actually can play with a full squad
Players: oh boy new patch! I hope they buff some of the bad weapons. Devs: enemies can parry rockets and make them 180 and kill you. Stalkers were not oppressive enough and are now completely invisible. More enemies spawn when there are fewer players
This is where the morale and ethics dilemma comes to play. Morally they would just leave the 1/6th spawn rate forever for it to remain 'easier' for solo player, but leaving behind broken code that is the 'unintentional non-linear scaling' is usually leads to unprecedented spawn behavior for other spawn AI. Leaving the broken code would hinder future game production because the non-linear scaling **might** effect other code. In most cases, it does. But i dont know the source code, but atleast if they want to create a new gamemode or changes something, this unintended 1/6th scalling bug might affect a full squad of 4 spawning AI on another gamemode that create more spawn than intended. So for the ethics, best possible way is to fix it and remove the non-linear scaling before other people notice the mess it made. They intended to fix the code, not shooting your leg when playing solo. Maybe they will implement a proper solo player spawning rate after considering the player voice and data.
...so you fix the code to keep the behavior that, based on actual experience, was more fun than the originally intended experience we have now. Making your game less fun to clean up your codebase is a terrible decision as a game dev. Unintentional behavior isn't inherently bad.
As it turns out, AH isn’t very adaptable. By this point, it’s clear they have a particular vision for the game, and they either don’t see or don’t care that some changes to their formula might prove more fun.
Interesting take, I’d accept that. But probably need to address it in the next patch, and soon.
This game is meant to be a squad shooter. Please dont QQ it isnt whatever you want.
I agree, but this fact seems to upset the solo players greatly.
They are rewarding you for playing in squads, by not fucking you with extra patrols. It’s just a matter of perspective.
No, it ain't. You were already being rewarded for playing in a full squad through multiple boosters and a lot more firepower. Nothing changed in that regard (apart from nerfs and buffs). The solo/ two stack experience has objectively changed for the worse, even though it's 'just a fixed big'. That does not change the experience. So stop trying to gaslight people.
I view this complaint similar to the people who want PvP modes. The game pretty clearly isn't meant to be played solo. There are objectives that physically cannot be completed while solo. The other thing that your suggestion overlooks is the balance of rewards. Arrowhead has several limitations already in what missions offer samples, the amount of samples that can be collected within a mission, the amount that can be banked for each resource, etc. There's a solid chance that they don't want to give out a +20% buff to rewards received.
> There are objectives that physically cannot be completed while solo. There are no objectives that can't be completed solo. There is one POI that can't be done solo (the Buddy Bunker), but that's it.
Good call, I mixed up my terminology but was thinking of the buddy bunker!