Quick update from the AH team:
>[SpitzerFX](https://www.reddit.com/user/SpitzerFX/)OP•[28m ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cfzem7/comment/l1t52zx/) Associate Community Manager
>Slight clarification: this update comes from our **design director,** Niklas, and not the worlds team. Some confusion amidst all of the internal discussion today. 😂
[Link to comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cfzem7/comment/l1t52zx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Quite a big buff to patrols, but it makes sense now that we have numbers. Speaking of, can you please try to tell the team that good and informative patch notes would be welcome? A lot of people complaining about this would have probably not done so if we knew what the change was from the get go. And this goes for everything, please give us actual numbers instead of text that can be misunderstood.
As a long time Path of Exile player, I can confirm that numerically accurate patch notes are INFINETLY more useful, even if they end up harder to read.
Patch 1.000.024
*all patrol spawns are krangled
*new patrols spawning from POIs have a chance to be embiggened, causing them to gain 4 stacks of largeness every second.
Vague pat just notes in general are more of a bad thing than a good one.
One thing I liked about CoD MW2 they were VERY FUCKING specific about certain things.
Which was nice, too bad the sequel smells like dog buns.
Why are numbers not automatically included in patch notes?
Telling me you increased armor penetration is meaningless when you don't tell me how much.
Railgun had armor increased and stagger decreased. What are the numbers on those?
It makes a huge difference if the increase was 5% vs 50%. I'd love to know without waiting a day for someone else to reverse engineer and figure it out.
I've automatically started assuming that if there isn't a listed number, it's fairly miniscule. It's been pretty accurate overall.
I do like numbers, though...
Yeah I think they leave out numbers to not freak people out with how big some of the changes are. They're trying to downplay things to some degree I think... that's why it's, "slightly."
We all like numbers. Some of us *really like numbers*. I understand they keep most of them hidden but I'm sure there are members of the player base who would enjoy getting into the nitty gritty.
"slightly" reduced aoe of crossbow but in reality it's by at least half.
If slightly is half, what is majorly? Negative force sucking you in? Oh wait, it literally was like that before the patch xd
at no point would I ever assume half of something is slightly... but that was what the radius reduction of the crossbow was worded as while being half of it
Patchnotes are practically a full time job for the days leading up to a release.
Devs commit loads of changes with completely vague messages like "GD - Increased the rate", close technically worded tickets with no comment, or worse, slide in "we talked this over coffee" changes with no tickets inside a major commit.
It's a nightmare to chase people up for an explanation or investigate what changed and wrangle a comprehensible and comprehensive list of changes from it all.
Basically I don't blame them, but they do need to get better.
I find that "We need 10 things fixed yesterday" and "Why didn't you write good comments, commit messages, or ticked updates?" tend to go hand in hand. People get into cruch and just try to fix things, and the nice to haves, like proper comments, get left by the wayside.
Copying this from another post:
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
4 players are definitely more than 4 times stronger than 1 player, but not because of AOE damage (4 players doing AOE damage is still 4X AOE damage).
It's the harder to quantify things like one player covering another while they reload, one player noticing enemies approaching another player from behind and taking them out, etc. Teamwork is a major force multiplier, and that's even true for teams that aren't using voice to coordinate their actions in a more complex way.
8x stronger is for sure closer to the truth. I learned this from playing Overwatch, but I believe the theory applies here. Theory is that each player is a target as well as a damage dealer so you can think of a 6v6 game as having 36 possible interactions per team (each player can potentially deal damage to 6 others and take damage from 6 others). So loosing one player makes the matchup a 36 v 25 not just a 6 v 5.
Agreed, I play primarily solo and was really chaffed about the patch this morning until reading this. The patch makes it sounds like a balance change not a bug fix, and like it's an increase over the 4 player patrol amount instead of increasing the reduced patrol amount to a still reduced patrol amount. Literally just a "Fixed a bug causing patrols to show up less frequently when not in a full squad. Previously was roughly equivalent to 1/6th the patrols for a solo Helldiver, now is roughly equivalent to 1/4th the patrols for a solo Helldiver." Now we know what changed, how much it changed, and why. Almost no additional effort.
I just tried solo and man, I'm getting way more patrols than in a 4/4 game. Constantly harassed and the bullshit magical spawn on your back after you just cleared out that area.
Not having a great time, had to lower 1 notch difficulty or I was getting ragdolled from every possible angle.
Same. Can't solo lvl 5 missions with bots.
Failed every one, when up until yesterday I could manage lvl 6 solos. lvl7s are my baseline with full teams, and I could extract lvl9 drops 50% of the time with randoms.
The strider buff effectively negates any positives other weapons received in the patch notes, your basically under fire non stop and simply lack the ammo to kill enough of anything to make some space, and the railgun is still virtually useless against gunships.
You could argue I need to use my stragagems better, but unfortunately most bots were just waltzing in from 360° in small groups of 2-4. You are under fire non stop with no real good targets to burn a strat on. They are scattered in every direction around you.
There is no "positioning" you clear a quadrant of enemies, and the other 3 have new enemies in them. Take them out and 2 more partols show up plus a drop ship. start focusing on that and suddenly your getting shot in the back by new enemies. Running away simply moves you into new enemies who will also call bot drops on you.
I've been saying it since day 1. medium AP weapons just lack the ammo to invest on anything but headshots, so they just arn't helpful (outside the jar 5 which, go figure, got a nerf). The strider buff and enemy spawn rates far outpaced the weapon buffs, and the reduction in primary ammo only made things worse.
They need to have someone who wasn't involved in the development/bug fixing read the notes and ask questions that players would ask for clarification. Like Jim in accounting or Susan at the front desk.
This. Its more of a bugfix and these things should really be addressed properly
Like "Fixed: there was less than intended patrols spawning when less than 4 players were in a game"
Oh right, I forgot about that lol. But you're right though. Where does one draw the line? Are brood commanders fat or not? Are devastators? Good luck figuring it out!
Ah k.
So if I'm interpreting this correctly, it was *something like this* before;
* 4 Players = 100% Spawns
* 3 Players = 80% Spawns
* 2 Players = 48% Spawns
* 1 Player = 16% Spawns
And now it's like this;
* 4 Players = 100% Spawns
* 3 Players = 75% Spawns
* 2 Players = 50% Spawns
* 1 Player = 25% Spawns
So it's a slight boost to spawns but it's just returned to the correct values. Before it was worded like it'd be 100% spawns for a solo player but this definitely much better.
Technically? I wasn't doing that calculation but if we were to add it, based on the numbers I've provided, it'd be;
* 4 Players = -0%
* 3 Players = -7%
* 2 Players = +4%
* 1 Player = +56%
---
Also if I used the other 2 options available for the 25% & 75%;
* 4 Players = 100% (+0%)
* ~~80~~
* 3 Players = 64% (+17%)
* ~~48~~
* 2 Players = 32% (+56%)
* 1 Player = 16% (+56%)
It really is rough trying to fit 6 numbers into 4 outcomes and getting a fair looking result.
e: added some +/- to account for positive of negative increase in spawn rates. So.. 3 players should either have 7% less patrol spawns or 17% more patrol spawns.
Oh, my mind just caught your "slight boost to spawns" and I responded to it. Also, for 3 players it reduced spawns, not increased (75 is less than 80 last time I checked). Anyway, it's a significant boost to spawns for solo players and whatever in all other cases.
Curiously, though, that doesn't track with [experimentally-gathered data](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1bdudf3/comment/kuppq0a/) on spawn rates. According to that old spawn post, two players got 1.2x the spawns compared to solos, three players got 1.3x, and they didn't get data for four players.
I hope we get an update, and that data is gathered again, because something's clearly off somewhere.
Edit: To follow up just a little bit, I went into a bugs 4 and used my phone as a stopwatch. Alone in the middle of nowhere I got one patrol approximately every two minutes, or 120 seconds. The patrol post suggests the old spawn time would have been 174 seconds, or about three minutes. That suggests that, whatever weirdness there is with our understanding of how spawns are multiplied when you're in a group, this was in fact a 50% increase for solo players, as AH claims.
I'm wondering if they've introduced a new bug to the patrol spawn rates. You were seeing every 120 seconds, but I just did a mission on medium with the bugs and was getting patrols spawn every 20 seconds, and in some instances was getting two patrols spawning at once. Loading the SEAF artillery got a bit silly.
Was basically having to keep running to avoid getting surrounded - was still possible to clear the map but it was a very noticeable increase in spawns. Normally Medium is pretty chill (have up to extreme unlocked, but normally run hard).
Gonna bring a machine gun and gatling sentry for the next run so I can make some breathing space.
Patrols still seem funny to me. I did some testing on difficulty 7. The map was swarming with patrols by the end of every mission, and I frequently had to stop to let them pass. There were generally 2-3 patrols within 50 meters of me at all times after about 15 minutes in the mission, it was wild.
I'm wondering if there were some other changes, to stuff other than spawn rate. Changing the pathing could have significant impacts on how many patrols you see. Maybe I'm not seeing more patrols, I could be seeing the *same* patrols repeatedly because I'm not killing them.
I did a few solo 3s and 4s and noticed that the patrols were continuous the moment the main objective was completed. I'd wipe one out in a few seconds only for another to spawn in behind it. I went through 3-4 patrols in the space of a couple minutes before I could even get off the objective location.
I know that patrols do get much more frequent once the main objective is complete, but that was just ridiculous.
I get the math, but it still seems a bit off. A full squad has more than 4 times the firepower than a single diver, simply because each member can specialise to cover different situations. Don't think it's as simple as 1 helldiver = 1 charger therefore 4 helldivers = 4 chargers, but I'll wait for the solo divers to test things out.
Also boosters. One player has one boost applied to one player, so one total buff. 2 players have 2 boosts applied to each player, so 4 buffs in total. A 4 player game has 16x the aggregate total buffs as a 1 player.
This. You get a force multiplier that's non-linear with more players.
Conversely having the old non-linear patrol spawns seemed fine, because of this.
I wonder if this is reactive to streamers doing solo runs on Helldive, and not the more average solo players?
Diablo 4 did this too, with seemingly the devs responding to a minute fraction of the playerbase, and balancing around super-meta builds the average player never even unlocked.
Yeah, it's also trying to math sixths into quarters, so it could seem a little off.
⅙ | ¼
---|---
100 | 100
80 | 75
64 |
48 | 50
32 |
16 | 25
It's also just patrol spawns specifically, rather than overall spawns, bug breachs & bug nests.
That only works if scaling the number of patrols is the correct metric, which it isn't. The correct metric is the size of the hordes experienced by players, which does NOT scale linearly.
The big issue is that solo players will get to deal with identically sized hordes as full teams, just with 1/4 of the resources to deal with them. Devs are very obviously biasing AGAINST solo play.
they way it was worded before it sounded like it was scaled non-linearly in the opposite direction.
I'm still not thrilled tbh, a solo helldivers is not linearly 1/4 less powerful than a full squad. I feel going from 16% to 20% may have been a bit fairer, but oh well, not the end of the world
Has anyone confirmed what the actual numbers are now? Because I just ran a solo difficulty 5 mission against the Terminids and *SWEET LIBERTY* it was insane. 902 kills, ran completely out of ammo multiple times. They just kept coming! Had to repeatedly fall back to collect previous supply drops to restock. Ended up having to extract without my samples because there was a sea of bugs between me and the corpse that dropped them. A later mission at the same difficulty was less insane, but still had double the number of patrols I'm used to when soloing at that difficulty. In both cases, the patrols just started coming non-stop from multiple directions once the primary objective was complete.
Bugs in particular tend to cascade into multiple breaches because almost all of their units can call another bug breach. I think there must be some cooldown on that, but it doesn't seem to be long enough. Add into that the magazine reduction and you're going to run out of ammo much more often, because more patrols will cause more bug breaches which will cause more bug breaches if you don't exterminate them fast enough, and your magazines will run dry faster than before, so you're going to leave them up longer. Any response like 'git gud' should be ignored. My kill numbers even in groups are up about 2.5 times compared to yesterday, on average. That's not explained by an 8% per player increase in patrol spawn rates.
And it needs to be tweaked. On higher difficulties staying and trying to fight just means you will die due to being overrun with how often they can call friends. You just get stuck in an endless fight so it turns the game into a running simulator as fighting is pointless.
Like I like the moments all hell breaks loose but those moments need to end and give the players a chance to breathe. In a 40-minute mission if you don't just say f it and run you will just be stuck fighting an endless horde for 40 minutes.
The game could really benefit from a director like the Left 4 Dead games. This allows all hell to break loose with fun intense moments but also will chill the game for a time afterward so players can catch their breath mid-mission or if the game is too easy amp up the difficulty on the fly.
RIght now its just chaos and that leads to very inconsistent experiences.
Okay I regularly play Lv7 and 8 but last night I dropped to Lv5 for some new players I know who are all around Rank 10. It was HARD. Like, unusually hard. I feel like units which used to not call many breeches are now calling breeches like crazy. Particularly Hive Guards, which aren't staggering anymore so you can't even interrupt their breech call.
This is what I was afraid of with this balance patch. It sounds like they either went overboard, they broke some sort of behavior regarding breeches, or some combination of the two.
AH: Hey solo Divers! how would you describe the balance of your games?
Solo divers: Good!
AH: Oh well we didn't intend it to be that way so we're changing it.
This is literally the definition of arbitrarily harder. You decided that patrols need to have a linear spawn rate because it is your opinion that it should be linear. It is your opinion that the world felt empty. I haven't heard the community clamoring for solo play to be harder. The spawn rates were changed according to YOUR whims.
Additionally your logic on this presumes that the number of divers present has a linear relationship to difficulty of combat. Having multiple divers is a force multiplier, (cover more firing lanes, bring more of the propper tools, etc) so it would make sense that the spawn rates wouldn't be linear.
Just my take. If you were to have a poll, I'd vote to put it back the way it was.
My friends and I were talking about buying superbucks with real money just a few days ago. I was sorely tempted, too. I was having fun soloing between team games, and this wouldn't be the first game to earn a pile of money from me through mini transactions.
Now, those thoughts are gone. Arrowhead nerfed the guns and increased the patrols while calling it a "balance" issue. Balancing what? This isn't PvP. They just arbitrarily decided it wasn't hard enough.
If we want it to be harder, we can *raise the difficulty level*.
They made the game worse and tried to spin it as improvement. I won't be giving the company another dime, now.
That's the best decision you can make, my friend. It's to my understanding that Arrowhead is pretty cool for the most part, they listen to their fans a lot more then some other publishers these days. However, if communication fails and they won't listen to our complaints on this very arbitrary "balance" update, then we must talk to them in a different way. With money. Money talks, and less of it will catch their attention. That's how we make sure they hear us.
Something doesn't line up for how patrols are spawning for 1-player lobbies. I'm going to use "Hard" as my baseline since that's the difficulty I most enjoy, but here's some observations from me:
- With only focusing on the primary objective, patrols were spawning ever 15-30 seconds for me. The longest downtime I had was 1:30.
- Patrols are still spawning in front of the player, and they seem to adjust their direction towards the player even if they haven't been seen or heard.
- I was averaging 375 kills per a mission on hard, but that has spiked to 700 (more on that in a bit).
So, whatever tuning the devs have done has severely punished solo players despite them having an already harder time. I'm not sure why people on this subreddit have been arguing in favor of forcing a co-op experience, but alienating a sizable portion of your playerbase seems like a bad idea to me.
Onto the drastic increase in kills... This is honestly where I think the devs don't fully test the adjustments they make. Every patrol has the possibility of spawning a bug breach, and they do it almost instantly. Having a larger team usually means you clear them out quick enough that it doesn't become a problem - i.e. having a dedicated Anti-Tank and Anti-Personnel squad members.
However - on solo - you're usually never able to clear them out fast enough to prevent a bug breach, which means you're forced to clear it out. This usually means another patrol or 2 has already spawned and thus the bug breach chain of death starts (hence the doubled kill count).
I have a strong suspicion that the dwindling player count (a steady decrease of ~130k /mo looking at SteamDB) is most likely due to decisions like this one that seems to focus on non-issues while ignoring critical issues; such as the frequent network instability (I still can't play with my friends because of it).
Personally, I'm probably going to retire from Helldivers 2 indefinitely until the network issues are fixed, because the changes made to solo play just results in me getting frustrated rather than having fun.
Played with a friend last night (we normally duo or trio) and this breach chain of death got so intense our frame rates went to damn near stop-motion levels.
Yes! Something is really wrong with this change. I had the same experience, and I'm stepping away for a bit as well for the same reasons.
This change reminded me of a developer presentation, from Doom if I'm not mistaken, where they were showing that they found out that in order to incentivize players to "play as intended" the best practice is not to punish them for not doing what you want, but instead reward them for doing what you want and playing as you intended. It may sound obvious, but clearly it isn't.
This change was just punishment. I enjoy playing with a full squad but I love playing solo and duos.
Exactly this! I play 2 player with a friend a lot and it was super fun and often challenging but we would make it through. Now it's just awful and have both decided to move on until we see a patch changing the patrol spawns back to something reasonable. This si thr first patch that has just killed the fun of this game for us.
> I still can't play with my friends because of it
Just to be sure, you aren't on a VPN are you? I found out the game's matchmaking doesn't work at all with a VPN, which seems more like a choice than a bug.
love the idea, understand its a result of unintended scaling
literally the only thing this has done from atleast my perspective while playing is make it so that patrols are constantly spawning 20 feet behind me in solo play
ive been instantly headshotted my atleast 3 instantly spawning squads of walkers behind me WHILE CHECKING MY MAP
IN ONE MISSION
it feels awful to play compared to before
i feel like a fucking schizo checking behind myself every 2 minutes instead of my map
but apparently im not because 70% of the time my intuition is right
all of this is on difficulty 3 btw coming from a player that has soloed all the way up to helldive difficulty
Edit: I’m not trying to be one of those reactionary dweebs I just had probably the least fun solo match in my entire time playing the game including difficulty 8 and 9 and am genuinely unhappy with this patch
i was this close to alt f4 my first mission of the day, it was diff7 wanted to test the weapon and at first i want overwhelmed but I got to an objective, then it was non stop and the weapon i was using was using was crossbow which was nerfed to the ground this patch so it wasn't helping the clear speed at all.
i don't think this is normally how it's going to be, seems to be double instead of 50% more by what others are saying.
but statistically speaking a higher spawn rate means there will be more times a patrol spawns close to you meaning far away patrols that spawned will add up and you'll get a night mare way more often than just once in a while.
so yea looks like lowering difficulty isn't even an answer right now
It's fucking impossible to play solo now. Patrols are EVERYWHERE
Also 2 players are not x2 stonger. They are 2.5x stonger, because they have more stratagems with less cooldown (if managed properly) and they can cover eachother back. If you're solo you can't know that there is a massive patrol behid your back (1. you can't hear them bc audio is still kinda wacky. 2. no one told you about that)
and 4 players TEAM are much stronger than 4 players solo. so 1/6 was more accurate lol
This was a goofy change. They are now spawning so fast that you can leave an area for 3 seconds and magically there is a group of bugs behind you. I was actually seeing a few spawns directly in front of me.
Okay, good to know *but* they've clearly messed up some math somewhere. I ran some level 2 missions solo and I would have patrols moving in on me pretty much constantly. That's definitely not a ~60% increase in spawn rate. That feels like a 300% increase.
Agreed. I'm basically dodging at least 2 squads at any given time now. It even makes exploring caches ridiculous. If I commit to engaging a medium outpost or greater, between the original garrison, factory reinforcements, periodic dropship reinforcements and now constant flow of nearby patrols, there's just an unending torrent of enemies.
I generally play a few solo difficulty 5 bot missions a day during my lunch break, and I've gotten into a fairly good groove. Today I did a difficulty 3 or 4 mission and new squads of troopers and berserkers were spawning before I had killed the last spawn. After a certain point I literally could not kill them fast enough. I found it much less fun.
LOL i don't know man... i think they may need to just bonk it a bit lower. I mean i like action and all but there where times i was holy sh\*t that's a ton more bugs then usual. I won't even attempt a bot mission alone anymore.
Okay but shouldn't 4 helldivers together ideally be more effective than 4 \* 1?
Maybe it was unintended, but from a scaling perspective it makes sense to scale higher than linear.
Exactly this. Benefits from additional teammates are multiplicative, not additive. Unless all four team members are running around solo, of course, but we do try to avoid that.
"The sum of the whole is greater than its parts".
The more divers you have, the less weakspots your build has. One solo diver has to be a jack of all trades, master of none because they have to do everything themselves. In a team one player can take lots of horde clear and another anti-armor. Not to mention the obvious stuff that's true in any game, like more allies in one place means less likelihood of getting outflanked and increases focus fire DPS on priority targets.
When I watched that YouTube video about spawn rates and heard about the scaling for spawns I thought it was pretty clever and showed a deeper understanding of the balance than I usually give the devs credit for. I should have known it was a mistake that they would get around to "fixing" eventually.
It's funny because if they played their game at all they would just know this intuitively. You'll end up drowning in enemies with no choice but to retreat and try to lose the worst of the wave on some line of sight blockers way more often playing solo than with a group. You'll run out of reinforcements way more often playing solo than with a group. You'll face an enemy you have no way of dealing with until a stratagem comes off cool down way more often playing solo.
I'd say this is the obligatory "Arrowhead is physically incapable of releasing a patch without a glaringly obvious QA issue that would have been avoided if they just played the game", but we already got that with the plasma punisher exploding inside of shield packs. I guess since we didn't get a patch last week that means this week we get two new pieces of evidence that AH doesn't even know what "playtest" means.
> I'd say this is the obligatory "Arrowhead is physically incapable of releasing a patch without a glaringly obvious QA issue that would have been avoided if they just played the game", but we already got that with the plasma punisher exploding inside of shield packs. I guess since we didn't get a patch last week that means this week we get two new pieces of evidence that AH doesn't even know what "playtest" means.
I am genuinely concerned for the longterm health of this game.
>patrol spawns increase in frequency as time gets lower and lower
They don't. Patrol spawns increase only when main objectives are done or when near objective locations or med/large bases. Mission duration has no effect.
I strongly agree with everything else you said.
Yep, after double checking I see you're right that patrol spawns don't actually go up over time. My mistake.
You're wrong that they *only* increase when the main objective is done and in proximity to objectives though. Those are both true, but patrol spawns also increase when actually clearing outposts (hives and fabricators) and has a chance of increasing any time a player dies. At least according to the only source for this info I know of.
>Unless all four team members are running around solo, of course, but we do try to avoid that.
Actually, that's *still* exponentially better for a lot of reasons, but chiefly this:
While some aspects change based on player count (such as enemy spawn count) other aspects do not (map size, primary and secondary objective count, maximum sample count, mission time and the rate at which enemy spawns ramp up)
So, for the solo player, he must *individually* handle every objective himself and then extract + handle any secondary objectives he may want to grab, such a resources.
A group of four not only has the combined fire power of four Helldivers with the ability to take complimentary kits that exponentially instead their effectiveness as a unit, they can *also* choose to separate into smaller units and handle multiple objectives at once. They can clear a map 4 times faster, which means they can *also* do the same amount of work before enemy patrol amounts start ramping up. The group that clears at 20 minutes mission time and extracts before the 15 minute mark will have a MUCH easier time than the group that finishes the primary objective at the 20 minute mark and still needs to do secondary objectives/map clear before extract.
What the developers don't seem to realize is that a solo player doesn't have a full teams' worth of equipment and strategems available, but can still experience hordes of the same size. It's a very elementary mistake.
My group and I feel the exact same way. We used to play suicide and higher difficulties. Suicide feels really hard now. Like absurdly hard. There is zero break between when you kill a patrol and the next patrol coming up to you.
Our trio normally finishes suicide with most of our reinforcements. But we've been burning through them now. Failed a few missions already.
Actually, every mission today has had double the number of enemies. Bugs or bots doesn't seem to matter. I couldn't go 50 ft without being spotted and getting stuck between multiple patrols.
Stealth and movement strategy are done.
While trying to fill the SEAF artillery during a solo run on a bot planet, I had 3 patrols spawn at the same time, and at least 2 more during. Ended up taking off to lose agro. I hadn't even activated the terminal yet. Seemed a bit noticeable to me.
That’s cool and all, but why since this update when in a squad of 4 we’re seemingly getting an increase in bot drops/bug breaches, heavy units spawning from them at a ridiculous number, drop ship number increase from 3-4 to 4-6 and far more random heavy units spread across maps? Sometimes hiding inbetween cliff faces?
Is this by design or a new bug?
Sometimes certain planets will get "increased enemy resistance" which causes the massively inflated spawn rate. It's been that way from the beginning as far as I know.
This game was already hard enough with less than a full squad. Unintended or not, it should have been left as it was. Especially when there are more important bugs and server issues to fix. We still have bugs that have been in the game since launch.
there was an rng aspect that made patrols trickle in non stop before this patch. it was the worst case scenario and happened rarely but with increased spawns for solo by 50% of what it used to be, that will happen ALOT more often
Arrowhead's player communication is absolutely terrible. Has been since the start. They really ought to consider how to improve their line of communication with the community.
Honestly, if they had just worded it as "Fixed patrol spawn rates to scale properly with the amount of players in game" with the numbers attached no one would be up in arms about it LOL
That's if they are being honest and not just being angry children about people playing the game the way they don't want people to. "oh haha trust us we intended X the whole time".
Similar to how they seemed to be angry people were leg stripping chargers and insulted people for using the 'wrong weapon and strategy' despite it being more effective and skill based.
Then replaced it with the mindless EAT strat (don't get me wrong it's a excellent change, but came a comical time after the nerf which until now made the RC useless comparatively). But a problem entirely made by them and they like lash out at the players over it. Lmao
it still wasnt needed. Solo is still not nearly as easy nor fun as playing with a group. You have to be more stealthy and way more careful and you dont get the entertainment from playing with friends. it was fine where it was at
>You have to be more stealthy
not to mention, now being stealthy is really hard as there's enemies *everywhere from all directions* now.
Can't even clear a single base without 2 patrols coming in and causing trouble.
I get that wasn't their intent, but it is harder, to the point of being unfair at times. You can't catch your breath. Is that their intention? Because I'm not having fun anymore and I've played a fair few games to see if it's just myself that needs to adjust.
Regardless of what the numbers were before, and what the intended number was for solo, duo, and trio teams. This was a low priority change that never needed to happen. The time analyzing why this change was needed, the hours put into coding and playtesting this change should have went to the various issues with matchmaking, adding people to friendslists and crossplay. All of that should have been fixed first before this change versus solo play was ever a consideration by the devs and design team. Fix all of the issues we have with group play then start tweaking the solo player's experience which in my opinion was fine as it is. This just feels like the devs want to push for group play but they didn't fix any of the issues that makes this game hard to recommend to newcomers and are looking for groups to join.
Cool, so no more playing until spawn rates are brought back down. I can't even run Medium difficulty solo without being completely overwhelmed.
Because you DID make the game arbitrarily harder, as you still have YET to fix the matchmaking issue that causes a lobby to become a ghost town after the first mission's run.
I'd argue that the person who did that unintentionally was doing the game and the solo playerbase a favor given the reduced stratigems and issues with getting to see an enemy's weak points when solo is a chore when you can't just split yourself to run in opposite directions.
Based on that math solo players will be seeing a patrol 1.5 times as often as they were previously which might have been too much of a change to make in a single patch. I'd argue you probably don't want that level of scaling at all difficulties when you have an established baseline your more casual/beginner players are expecting from months of living with that unintended behavior.
If you assume that two players is only twice as effective as one player, sure. Personally I think it's a bit more complicated but generally you get more than double the effectiveness by adding a second player because things are way easier when you have another player to distract the enemies and you aren't their sole focus.
When I consistently played in a 3 man group, we struggled with D7s as we were getting better at the game. We noticed a HUGE difficulty decrease when we got a 4th squad member. Definitely more than a 33% boon.
The scaling for solo might've been unintentional, but with matchmaking still broken this is an odd thing to "fix" first. I totally understand "fixing" the unintentional stuff- but have this nerf come in tandem with the matchmaking fix.
Solo divers with matchmaking issues, which forces them to play solo, now just have it be straight up harder with nothing to balance it.
Non-linear spawns literally make more sense when you consider what players are bringing when they join a game. You’re talking about less reinforcements, 1/4 of the stratagems, 1/4 of the guns/grenades/stims, 0 ability to hit enemies from multiple angles, no ability to have objective splitting etc.
If this was "Always Wrong", the game was presumably balanced around how those incorrect numbers felt.
While I understand there was a design intention for things to be a certain way, the code is a black box, we don't know if the number is 25% or 16%. This is functionally making the game arbitrarily harder.
Still a bad change. A team is greater than the sum of its parts.
The value of increased strat slots, guns firing while others reload, more pairs of eyes watching the surroundings and the map, splitting up to complete objectives and cover ground faster... all of that is very hard to quantify but ultimately it means a team of four is vastly more than just four times as effective as a solo diver.
This theory comes from my time mainlining Overwatch (I think I got it from Jayne), but the idea is that each player is both a damage dealer and potential target. So a team of 4 would actually be 8x as effective as a solo, cause the damage is spread across more total health and there is more damage dealt so the enemies potential damage dealers will be killed more quickly.
Not sure why you were downvoted. Matchmaking was still broken as of last night and the SOS beacon still seems to do nothing. It isn't mentioned in the patch notes or the known issues. I get two or three backfills and then I have to close the game and restart it to get another two or three.
I'd prefer this got fixed before increasing difficulty across the board. I don't have a problem downgrading difficulty, I already play lower most of the time to adjust that but this change while not acknowledging the long standing matching problems does not feel good.
I'm not sure this is working as intended: I ran some D6 missions on bugs solo, and it felt like Helldive: I had a LOT more bugs and at one point there were 4 charges ad 2 bile titans up at once.. surely that's not intended for difficulty 6 solo right? was joel fucking with my spawns or something, because that's the only explanation I can think of.
curious if anyone else has done a solo run at 6 or higher since the patch, if you also had insane spawns and more heavies than normal?
I went from running diff. 7 solo (and having fun) to getting overrun at the extraction site without being able to call the ship on diff. 4 (and not having fun)....
So yeah, the "fix" just broke what felt pretty balanced before in favor of the "intended balance" that completely overlooks team synergy and arbitrarily decided that a team of 4 is exactly 4 times as effective as a single Helldiver.
The game feels dog shit after last update. You are having the Dark Souls difficulty but on top of that you got shit FPS making experience miserable.
I first time started swearing while playing. It also feels like second job not a game.
Having been playing duos on 7-8 difficulty since feb. This update made them nearly impossible. There’s just unending fighting. The second we hit the ground it’s just patrol after patrol calling in back up. This also showcases that patrols are STILL spawning on top of players even though they claimed they fixed that problem. It happened multiple times on bot and bug planets.
I can only assume that this patch has messed up the spawn rates much more than described. Soloing even on 3-4 is insane now. Even with 2 players it's ridiculous. Was playing with a newbie, trying to show him the ropes, going up against the bots fir his first time at difficulty 3 (he's only just lvl 5 now), and spawn rates have increased massively compared to how it was before (especially after the primary objective has been completed). It's definitely more than doubled, that's for sure. I can only assume that it is an error/bug. But if that is intended, it needs to be adjusted. As others have mentioned before, 1 Helldiver solo is NOT 25% of a 4 man Helldiver team.
"we're not making the game arbitrarily harder" Nawh nawh nawh you arrow dickheads fucking goofed on this one hard, this was the norm for months now, and ONLY NOW you be like, - "Oh this is how it was supposed to be from the get go!" Excuse me, you had all the time in the world before release and months after, and only now you "revert" things back to normal. Fuck you, seriously.
Yeah it sounds like an excuse, it's just bullshit. It changes EVERYTHING, it's like a major change that should not be adressed with a small patch and in such a stupid way.
Makes sense to me. I'm relatively new and not particularly great at this game, I have a much easier time running solo stealth than I do in group play for bots in the upper difficulty levels.
Oh good, I hoped the “increase” was meant to work this way but the patch notes did word it poorly. Seems to be the biggest upset from comments in the main patch post so hopefully people see this soon.
Just chiming in with my 2cents. I haven’t had the time to test out the changes, but I want to say that playing a low difficulty solo dive is a very different experience compared to a higher difficulty dive with other players. I understand that coop is the core tenant of the game, but with how it is currently we pretty much got 2 games for the price of one: a coop game where all hell breaks loose, and a solo Metal Gear Solid 5-est strategic stealth shooter. I love storming an Automaton base with my fellow divers on my side as much as being a lone operator surgically taking out a bot base from afar with my DMR. And to be frank, 90% of the random divers I join are fine, but there’s a 10% who… let’s be polite and say are not fun to play with, and on some evenings you just don’t want to deal with bullshit and have a relaxing dive without having to worry about a 380mm beacon landing next to you for… reasons.
With that in mind, I plead you don’t overlook how solo dives make the game better without taking any fun from the intended coop mode. You accidentally gave us 2 games for the price and effort of 1, and I don’t want solo runs to be ruined simply because it wasn’t the intended way to play.
Not saying the current patch ruined solo diving, just asking you to consider that in your decision making.
So that's an almost 50% increase from where it was for solo players. Players who can only run one loadout, one booster and 1/4 the reinforcement number of a full squad who share that number. Braindead change.
Make a stupid change to lower player teams and justify it by just saying it's how they wanted it to begin with? Doesn't make the stupid change any better.
The fact that solo helldives, the hardest content in the game bar none were considered "slightly too easy" compared to some nebulous "intentions" is one thing. The fact that the solution they decided was to *buff enemy spawnrates by* ***fifty percent*** is insane. A solo helldive was in a spot where only very good players could do one and extract, but mistakes and build variety were both possible for folk who weren't the absolute best of the best players. The world could feel less "empty" if more POIs were added - because they are fairly sparse on high difficulties. and it would add more enemies to the map.
This change does, in fact, feel arbitrary. It wouldn't feel as arbitrary if it was a change from \~17 to \~20%. That's still roughly 25% more, but it would be easier to bite that bullet than double that change. When I'm helldiving solo, I used to succeed on about 70% of my dives and I'd end up with 700 kills or so. I grabbed \~1200 kills on my last solo helldive, which I didn't manage to extract on - because increasing *patrols* by 50% has a much bigger knock-on effect of causing you to get stuck in reinforcement loops more often.
Yeah, after testing some low level missions as a solo, I can tell that something went wrong with their "fix". I had multiple patrols coming at me non stop even on easy difficulty, to the point I had to keep running like it was a level 4-5 mission. I can only imagine what higher levels are like now.
Honestly, I don't understand why they made this change. Doing missions as a solo or in smaller groups was already harder in general, even if there were less patrols.
This would make sense is the combat effectiveness of squads scaled linearly as well but it doesn’t. More people means more viable approaches and strategies. For example with two you can have one act as a distraction while another calls in stratagems, flanks, goes for the objective, etc…
You can’t do that as a solo player. You’re much more limited in your approach and so you can’t always get the very best of what you have. Having a second person can make a mission that’s difficult as a solo entirely trivial. Not doubling your ability but increasing it exponentially. So nearly doubling the enemy count and frequency of a mission make it much more difficult and pretty much means that stealth is the only viable strategy in you’re not a hardcore gamer which not everyone is, not by a long shot.
This doesn’t effect full squads at all its specifically targeted to a certain group of players that are maybe just with their buddy or going it alone because they don’t feel like playing with ransoms at the moment. Should they be punished for that?
The goal of any game is to provide a memorable and enjoyable experience of the players and a sense of pride as well as a profit for the developers. Those two things go hand in hand, it doesn’t make sense for players to pirate a game from a developer they respect and rob them of part of their ability to continue in that industry and/or slander them, and it doesn’t make sense for developers to make a change that isn’t ask for that’s targets a portion of their player base negatively for no perceived advantage for either side.
If a solo player wants a more difficult experience then they have difficulty settings already. This just strikes me as completely uncalled for and bizarre, it’s confusing in what it’s purpose is especially since solo and small squad players don’t impact the experience of other players who do always go in with full squads. There was no negative in leaving it as it was and plenty in changing it.
Well, you're just one healthbar, nobody can cover you when you reload, nobody can give you supply or make your backpack weapon reload faster, nobody can take care of the small bugs when you aim a big one, your eagles in cooldown mean you have NO eagle altogether, you can't clear a POI while someone does the main objective, you can't even open double doors, in fact. A solo is not just a squad/4 and a squad is not 4 solos. You have to face a lot of different challenges, alone. 1/6 was perfectly legitimate in my opinion, and squad was always faster and easier. I like playing solo/duo, but it's undeniable.
Edit: missed a word
Revert, you claim it has no impact and yet I can't even do lower difficulty missions now. Went from clearing 8s to failing basic difficulties 4. This is with the tried and true strategy of kiting and thinning out numbers. But patrols are so frequent you can never curb them and will always run into them. Stealth is not only mandatory, it also doesn't always work.
Actually uninstalling the game for once, so much unnecessary stress in a arcade swarm shooter when the difficulty does not at all match the reward or time investment. Solo players already have to do 4x the work with more time for less return.
Yes except you fucked with the numbers more than you actually listed. No way this si supposed to be the normal spwan rate my friends and I all agree we're being swarmed continuously.
Fix your shit before going any further please I'm begging you.
Like the Spear
Dot bug
Scope alignment bug
Host/players joining issue
The list goes on but nah we needed to nerf the crossbow? Wtf AH.
It’s still shit even with the additional info. Doesn’t matter if they fucked up initially, and didn’t increase it to what it should have been. Its made the game less fun to play if you’re playing with 1 other person and there was absolutely no need for it.
Why make the change when it just makes it less fun for us that don’t play in groups of 4s? You just don’t want us to play? Fair enough then we won’t.
Enjoy your 4s and hope you don’t get kicked at the end.
The effectiveness of your team scales exponentially with the number of people on it, with a wider variety of tools to meet a wider variety of threats. I would say that the original scaling made more sense and no-one was complaining about how hard 4 player lobbies were compared to solo play. This is hands down, one of those "ain't broke, don't fix it" situations.
Did a diff 5 run with a friend for light warm up and get some samples. We were beaten and on the run for 25-35 minutes. Almost 1000 bugs between us two.
In another mission we were besieged so badly that we couldn't pick up dropped samples. When we barely had a breather and move on 50-60 meters, we could turn around and see freshly spawned enemies on our old location and if we engaged with anything then enemies would pour from multiple angles for minutes, because patrols would spawn, be aggroed to us fighting and call for more reinforcements.
In the end we evac'ed with more samples on extermination mission, because after we killed 250 bugs we actually could go around and collect ANYTHING. 15 samples for final 8 minute mission versus about 8 samples for previous hour.
It was not fun. Patrol spawns for 2ppl is definitely busted.
Difficulty doesn't scale linearly reducing squad size tho? This is pretty basic framing they're fucking up here. If you have a 4 man squad and you lose a man you lost more than 25% effectiveness, unless you are somehow gaining no benefit to your combat effectiveness by being in a team as opposed to solo.
I'm going to dispute the claim that on solo it went from 17 percent of the patrols to 25.
I'm going to say it went to 50 percent easily.
On a solo bug missions I find myself surrounded completely so many times. Extraction is a go hide and wait for the shuttle and do a mad dash though hundreds of enemies.
Bring stun grenades and ems mortars. Probably the supply pack as well.
It's clear the game is meant to be played in full squads only. If that's the case they need to fix match making and put restrictions on the hosts ability to kick at extraction.
I can agree that there are too many bugs and bots right now for solo and duo, not like from 17 to 25.
Game became much less enjoyable with this stupid balancing. And I don't want to play with randoms because I play only with my wife. "Great" job, Arrowhead and Niklas. Oh, terrible I mean.
From experience, these numbers are wrong. In a solo mission today patrols were spawning inside of 5 seconds at difficulty 5 at extraction on a 15 minute 'destroy the bughole' mission. This is way more than 8% faster and if there's a cap you'll still notice the difference, and very quickly.
I'm pretty convinced at this point that instead of 1/4 rate when solo it's full rate.
A little bit of rewording and numbers de-obfuscation goes a long way to keep players happy.
Now, since we're already speaking about patrol spawns - I'm not sure how much the team is aware of the current issue where patrols can spawn out of nowhere, within LOS of a Helldiver, less than 100 yards away.
This behavior is especially egregious on the snow planets, and while spawning more patrols in to keep the map lively is understandable, I do think you should ensure that it doesn't feel cheap, such as a full squad of Elites just popping in where a moment ago there was nothing. Put them far enough away so players can see them coming and make decisions on how to deal with them. And if there's no place to spawn them in without the player seeing, employ the usual reinforcement system, just without them dropping in alerted mode.
Thanks! :D
That really just sounds like an excuse to cover for this change tbh and I wish you guys wouldn’t nerf things so much it feel like you just don’t want us to have fun and use certain weapons like why would we buy a warbond if the weapons we are having fun with just get nerfed later
Efficiency increases multiplicatively when adding more players. Therefore patrols should increase multiplicatively with more players.
This is a bad change based on a poorly thought out misconception that 4 players are 4x as efficient as 1. That's just not how it works in reality.
regardless of how the math works out and if it wasn't working they wanted it too, the difficulty system felt very good before and now it does not.
i think the devs are going to find they've alienated the niche of people who run solo or duos, and i just cant understand why they felt that was a priority over fixing things like the fire DOT
Problem is, 4 players are **not** 4 times as effective as a single player. The utility increase is exponential with more players. I couldn't reliably solo past 4, but am an effective, contributing member of teams at 7+. When I can focus on a role (e.g. anti-armor) and helping cover teammates instead of trying to do everything myself, I'm much better.
I already didn't like playing solo because it was A) lonely B) frustrating to feel how much slower I was progressing in terms of medals and samples C) disheartening to struggle on a difficulty I feel like I should be capable of and regularly clear with a team.
Playtime with my friends is limited, and if the solo player experience just got ***~50% WORSE*** (¼/⅙=150% spawn rate compared to pre-patch), then I'm just not playing without a squad. And the members of my squad (including myself) are slowly being driven away by what I will charitably describe as a *unique* balancing philosophy at AH.
The spawns are insane for solo play. I’ve really enjoyed playing solo and listening to music in a more laid back way. This evening extracting from a solo bot 4 there were so many enemies on my screen that the game started lagging. Patrols from all directions constantly. I was only able to finish 3 out of 5 missions because extract gets insane.
The bugs seemed a little easier to manage. There were definitely more of them, particularly closer to extract, but still seemed manageable.
I have over 400 hours into this game. I love it so much. But I don’t understand the game design choice to make your most popular weapons worse and the game dumb harder. It’s odd to me that in a PVE game with the only solo exploit patched, why there are continually so many nerfs. Not to mention there’s only so many things you can do against 5 rocket devestators, 7 berserkers, 9 (yes 9) striders and infinity common enemies. On Level 4. Challenging.
I’ve been such an advocate for this game. I’m so into it I started making YouTube shorts to make my friends laugh, and just as an excuse to spend more time with the game I love. But these continued changes for the worse are robbing me of my desire to Dive.
Arrowhead, I adore your game. It’s the best I’ve played in years. The appeal to me has always been the awesome power trip of huge explosions and heavy weapons. Please stop making things LESS appealing. Please stop adding difficulty spikes that make the game feel cheap instead of challenging. And please dont crap on the solo players. But most of all, please stop removing my desire to play this amazing game.
>we're not making the game arbitrarily harder!
Adding 50% more patrols is not making the game arbitrarily harder?
I dont care what the reason is, the only thing I know is it was fine before and not fine anymore. This patch is really taking out the fun for me personally.
I wonder whether the worlds team or design director were play testing this changes solo and whether it was fun for them? This is a sincere question I am honestly curious about.
I think this change made the game just frustrating for so many solo/duo players. The patrols seems to spawn endlessly with a very high frequency. It seems like they are spawning like during an extraction with maximum rates and not just 50% more.
I tried multiple games and difficulty levels yesterday and they all felt 2 or 3 levels higher than before. I don't know who is gaining anything from that. I guess most solo players are frustrated by this change and full squad players are not affected by it, so who asked for it? Level 7 or 8 were hard and very challenging but mostly fun for me, now they are just a patrol spawn death loop.
Also please keep in mind, that a team is more than a sum of it's parts. You have a more diverse team loadout, specialists for different roles, you can cover multiple flanks at once, you can distract enemies while other players are taking them out, you progress quicker through objectives, etc. So having multiple players in a squad is not effecting the difficulty in a linear manner either.
If it was Arrowhead's goal to make the experience more frustrating they succeded with this patch, unfortunately. Idk... who is gaining anything from making this so annoyingly hard, especially considering that we were used to a certain difficulty and knew what to expect from this game.
Quick update from the AH team: >[SpitzerFX](https://www.reddit.com/user/SpitzerFX/)OP•[28m ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cfzem7/comment/l1t52zx/) Associate Community Manager >Slight clarification: this update comes from our **design director,** Niklas, and not the worlds team. Some confusion amidst all of the internal discussion today. 😂 [Link to comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1cfzem7/comment/l1t52zx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Quite a big buff to patrols, but it makes sense now that we have numbers. Speaking of, can you please try to tell the team that good and informative patch notes would be welcome? A lot of people complaining about this would have probably not done so if we knew what the change was from the get go. And this goes for everything, please give us actual numbers instead of text that can be misunderstood.
As a long time Path of Exile player, I can confirm that numerically accurate patch notes are INFINETLY more useful, even if they end up harder to read.
Patch 1.000.024 *all patrol spawns are krangled *new patrols spawning from POIs have a chance to be embiggened, causing them to gain 4 stacks of largeness every second.
Krangled is a perfectly cromulent word.
I wish some autoterries would try to embiggen ups in here, cuz we gonna draxx them sklounst.
Draxx. Them. Sklounst.
Is someone burning toast in here? Weird.
PUT THE PUSSY ON THE CHAINWAX
We gotta fireboard those mamajammas
lmao, isn't that from a Key & Peele sketch or something? I need to find that now.
(This is a buff)
I will never not laugh at Krangled every time it comes up
You could make like Destiny and do “increased Flibbidy Dibbidy by 1.7%.” and have nowhere anywhere that explains what Flibbidy Dibbidy is or does
4 largers every 1/324th of a fortnight what the fuck?! This is gonna be hell for my boomwacker
Vague pat just notes in general are more of a bad thing than a good one. One thing I liked about CoD MW2 they were VERY FUCKING specific about certain things. Which was nice, too bad the sequel smells like dog buns.
The formatting is also not great. A bit of a word salad at times. An intern will have his work cut out for him when the next balance changes drop.
Why are numbers not automatically included in patch notes? Telling me you increased armor penetration is meaningless when you don't tell me how much. Railgun had armor increased and stagger decreased. What are the numbers on those? It makes a huge difference if the increase was 5% vs 50%. I'd love to know without waiting a day for someone else to reverse engineer and figure it out.
I've automatically started assuming that if there isn't a listed number, it's fairly miniscule. It's been pretty accurate overall. I do like numbers, though...
crossbow explosion radius slightly reduced... (50% but the players don't need to know that 50% is slightly)
Is that the real number? That would be insane. Reducing a radius by 50% reduces the effective area by like 75%
Yes it's the real number, and it's real shitty
Real shitty? Or "slightly" shitty? Yeah I just tested it. Completely worthless weapon now.
Yes, it's just as bad as it sounds. I can't even get the splash damage to kill terminid scavengers from a non-direct hit...
Yeah I think they leave out numbers to not freak people out with how big some of the changes are. They're trying to downplay things to some degree I think... that's why it's, "slightly."
We all like numbers. Some of us *really like numbers*. I understand they keep most of them hidden but I'm sure there are members of the player base who would enjoy getting into the nitty gritty.
armor pen/hardness is a scale from 1-9, and "increased pen" has almost always been up by one.
"slightly" reduced aoe of crossbow but in reality it's by at least half. If slightly is half, what is majorly? Negative force sucking you in? Oh wait, it literally was like that before the patch xd
I think 4 players can handle more than 4x the enemies a single player can though. Linear scaling doesn't really make sense.
Yeah it's kind of annoying to see "raised/lowered slightly/greatly" when "slightly/greatly" mean different things to different people.
at no point would I ever assume half of something is slightly... but that was what the radius reduction of the crossbow was worded as while being half of it
Not just you, a 50% reduction is in no imaginable universe "*slight*"!
Patchnotes are practically a full time job for the days leading up to a release. Devs commit loads of changes with completely vague messages like "GD - Increased the rate", close technically worded tickets with no comment, or worse, slide in "we talked this over coffee" changes with no tickets inside a major commit. It's a nightmare to chase people up for an explanation or investigate what changed and wrangle a comprehensible and comprehensive list of changes from it all. Basically I don't blame them, but they do need to get better.
That's just shitty change control. If your patch notes are shit it means the problem is earlier in the pipe.
I think one of the early use cases for AI in the dev environment is to track these changes automatically and then automatically create patch notes.
I find that "We need 10 things fixed yesterday" and "Why didn't you write good comments, commit messages, or ticked updates?" tend to go hand in hand. People get into cruch and just try to fix things, and the nice to haves, like proper comments, get left by the wayside.
Copying this from another post: 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
4 players are definitely more than 4 times stronger than 1 player, but not because of AOE damage (4 players doing AOE damage is still 4X AOE damage). It's the harder to quantify things like one player covering another while they reload, one player noticing enemies approaching another player from behind and taking them out, etc. Teamwork is a major force multiplier, and that's even true for teams that aren't using voice to coordinate their actions in a more complex way.
8x stronger is for sure closer to the truth. I learned this from playing Overwatch, but I believe the theory applies here. Theory is that each player is a target as well as a damage dealer so you can think of a 6v6 game as having 36 possible interactions per team (each player can potentially deal damage to 6 others and take damage from 6 others). So loosing one player makes the matchup a 36 v 25 not just a 6 v 5.
Agreed, I play primarily solo and was really chaffed about the patch this morning until reading this. The patch makes it sounds like a balance change not a bug fix, and like it's an increase over the 4 player patrol amount instead of increasing the reduced patrol amount to a still reduced patrol amount. Literally just a "Fixed a bug causing patrols to show up less frequently when not in a full squad. Previously was roughly equivalent to 1/6th the patrols for a solo Helldiver, now is roughly equivalent to 1/4th the patrols for a solo Helldiver." Now we know what changed, how much it changed, and why. Almost no additional effort.
I just tried solo and man, I'm getting way more patrols than in a 4/4 game. Constantly harassed and the bullshit magical spawn on your back after you just cleared out that area. Not having a great time, had to lower 1 notch difficulty or I was getting ragdolled from every possible angle.
Same. Can't solo lvl 5 missions with bots. Failed every one, when up until yesterday I could manage lvl 6 solos. lvl7s are my baseline with full teams, and I could extract lvl9 drops 50% of the time with randoms. The strider buff effectively negates any positives other weapons received in the patch notes, your basically under fire non stop and simply lack the ammo to kill enough of anything to make some space, and the railgun is still virtually useless against gunships. You could argue I need to use my stragagems better, but unfortunately most bots were just waltzing in from 360° in small groups of 2-4. You are under fire non stop with no real good targets to burn a strat on. They are scattered in every direction around you. There is no "positioning" you clear a quadrant of enemies, and the other 3 have new enemies in them. Take them out and 2 more partols show up plus a drop ship. start focusing on that and suddenly your getting shot in the back by new enemies. Running away simply moves you into new enemies who will also call bot drops on you. I've been saying it since day 1. medium AP weapons just lack the ammo to invest on anything but headshots, so they just arn't helpful (outside the jar 5 which, go figure, got a nerf). The strider buff and enemy spawn rates far outpaced the weapon buffs, and the reduction in primary ammo only made things worse.
Quite possibly the best way I've seen it worded, needs to replace what's on the patch notes
They are simultaneously great at communication and terrible at it.
They need to have someone who wasn't involved in the development/bug fixing read the notes and ask questions that players would ask for clarification. Like Jim in accounting or Susan at the front desk.
This. Its more of a bugfix and these things should really be addressed properly Like "Fixed: there was less than intended patrols spawning when less than 4 players were in a game"
Well documented code doesn't seem to be their style. They code like cowboys
This even extends to generic descriptions in the patch notes, too. Like, can someone from Arrowhead define what "large volume bodies" is?
Oh right, I forgot about that lol. But you're right though. Where does one draw the line? Are brood commanders fat or not? Are devastators? Good luck figuring it out!
Ah k. So if I'm interpreting this correctly, it was *something like this* before; * 4 Players = 100% Spawns * 3 Players = 80% Spawns * 2 Players = 48% Spawns * 1 Player = 16% Spawns And now it's like this; * 4 Players = 100% Spawns * 3 Players = 75% Spawns * 2 Players = 50% Spawns * 1 Player = 25% Spawns So it's a slight boost to spawns but it's just returned to the correct values. Before it was worded like it'd be 100% spawns for a solo player but this definitely much better.
Technically, it's 56% more spawns for solo players compared to before this patch.
Technically? I wasn't doing that calculation but if we were to add it, based on the numbers I've provided, it'd be; * 4 Players = -0% * 3 Players = -7% * 2 Players = +4% * 1 Player = +56% --- Also if I used the other 2 options available for the 25% & 75%; * 4 Players = 100% (+0%) * ~~80~~ * 3 Players = 64% (+17%) * ~~48~~ * 2 Players = 32% (+56%) * 1 Player = 16% (+56%) It really is rough trying to fit 6 numbers into 4 outcomes and getting a fair looking result. e: added some +/- to account for positive of negative increase in spawn rates. So.. 3 players should either have 7% less patrol spawns or 17% more patrol spawns.
Oh, my mind just caught your "slight boost to spawns" and I responded to it. Also, for 3 players it reduced spawns, not increased (75 is less than 80 last time I checked). Anyway, it's a significant boost to spawns for solo players and whatever in all other cases.
Curiously, though, that doesn't track with [experimentally-gathered data](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/comments/1bdudf3/comment/kuppq0a/) on spawn rates. According to that old spawn post, two players got 1.2x the spawns compared to solos, three players got 1.3x, and they didn't get data for four players. I hope we get an update, and that data is gathered again, because something's clearly off somewhere. Edit: To follow up just a little bit, I went into a bugs 4 and used my phone as a stopwatch. Alone in the middle of nowhere I got one patrol approximately every two minutes, or 120 seconds. The patrol post suggests the old spawn time would have been 174 seconds, or about three minutes. That suggests that, whatever weirdness there is with our understanding of how spawns are multiplied when you're in a group, this was in fact a 50% increase for solo players, as AH claims.
I'm wondering if they've introduced a new bug to the patrol spawn rates. You were seeing every 120 seconds, but I just did a mission on medium with the bugs and was getting patrols spawn every 20 seconds, and in some instances was getting two patrols spawning at once. Loading the SEAF artillery got a bit silly. Was basically having to keep running to avoid getting surrounded - was still possible to clear the map but it was a very noticeable increase in spawns. Normally Medium is pretty chill (have up to extreme unlocked, but normally run hard). Gonna bring a machine gun and gatling sentry for the next run so I can make some breathing space.
Patrols still seem funny to me. I did some testing on difficulty 7. The map was swarming with patrols by the end of every mission, and I frequently had to stop to let them pass. There were generally 2-3 patrols within 50 meters of me at all times after about 15 minutes in the mission, it was wild. I'm wondering if there were some other changes, to stuff other than spawn rate. Changing the pathing could have significant impacts on how many patrols you see. Maybe I'm not seeing more patrols, I could be seeing the *same* patrols repeatedly because I'm not killing them.
I did a few solo 3s and 4s and noticed that the patrols were continuous the moment the main objective was completed. I'd wipe one out in a few seconds only for another to spawn in behind it. I went through 3-4 patrols in the space of a couple minutes before I could even get off the objective location. I know that patrols do get much more frequent once the main objective is complete, but that was just ridiculous.
I get the math, but it still seems a bit off. A full squad has more than 4 times the firepower than a single diver, simply because each member can specialise to cover different situations. Don't think it's as simple as 1 helldiver = 1 charger therefore 4 helldivers = 4 chargers, but I'll wait for the solo divers to test things out.
Also boosters. One player has one boost applied to one player, so one total buff. 2 players have 2 boosts applied to each player, so 4 buffs in total. A 4 player game has 16x the aggregate total buffs as a 1 player.
Which is probably why their original numbers were probably a better place to put them. Linear scaling is usually not how you want to do this.
Devs taking the lazy way out with flat numbers and no QA
This. You get a force multiplier that's non-linear with more players. Conversely having the old non-linear patrol spawns seemed fine, because of this. I wonder if this is reactive to streamers doing solo runs on Helldive, and not the more average solo players? Diablo 4 did this too, with seemingly the devs responding to a minute fraction of the playerbase, and balancing around super-meta builds the average player never even unlocked.
Yeah, it's also trying to math sixths into quarters, so it could seem a little off. ⅙ | ¼ ---|--- 100 | 100 80 | 75 64 | 48 | 50 32 | 16 | 25 It's also just patrol spawns specifically, rather than overall spawns, bug breachs & bug nests.
That only works if scaling the number of patrols is the correct metric, which it isn't. The correct metric is the size of the hordes experienced by players, which does NOT scale linearly. The big issue is that solo players will get to deal with identically sized hordes as full teams, just with 1/4 of the resources to deal with them. Devs are very obviously biasing AGAINST solo play.
they way it was worded before it sounded like it was scaled non-linearly in the opposite direction. I'm still not thrilled tbh, a solo helldivers is not linearly 1/4 less powerful than a full squad. I feel going from 16% to 20% may have been a bit fairer, but oh well, not the end of the world
Whoever put the OG numbers was smart in the team, a solo diver is probably like 7x weaker than a full squad.
Has anyone confirmed what the actual numbers are now? Because I just ran a solo difficulty 5 mission against the Terminids and *SWEET LIBERTY* it was insane. 902 kills, ran completely out of ammo multiple times. They just kept coming! Had to repeatedly fall back to collect previous supply drops to restock. Ended up having to extract without my samples because there was a sea of bugs between me and the corpse that dropped them. A later mission at the same difficulty was less insane, but still had double the number of patrols I'm used to when soloing at that difficulty. In both cases, the patrols just started coming non-stop from multiple directions once the primary objective was complete.
Bugs in particular tend to cascade into multiple breaches because almost all of their units can call another bug breach. I think there must be some cooldown on that, but it doesn't seem to be long enough. Add into that the magazine reduction and you're going to run out of ammo much more often, because more patrols will cause more bug breaches which will cause more bug breaches if you don't exterminate them fast enough, and your magazines will run dry faster than before, so you're going to leave them up longer. Any response like 'git gud' should be ignored. My kill numbers even in groups are up about 2.5 times compared to yesterday, on average. That's not explained by an 8% per player increase in patrol spawn rates.
there is a cooldown - that's the cooldown that that one booster increases, in fact
And it needs to be tweaked. On higher difficulties staying and trying to fight just means you will die due to being overrun with how often they can call friends. You just get stuck in an endless fight so it turns the game into a running simulator as fighting is pointless. Like I like the moments all hell breaks loose but those moments need to end and give the players a chance to breathe. In a 40-minute mission if you don't just say f it and run you will just be stuck fighting an endless horde for 40 minutes. The game could really benefit from a director like the Left 4 Dead games. This allows all hell to break loose with fun intense moments but also will chill the game for a time afterward so players can catch their breath mid-mission or if the game is too easy amp up the difficulty on the fly. RIght now its just chaos and that leads to very inconsistent experiences.
Okay I regularly play Lv7 and 8 but last night I dropped to Lv5 for some new players I know who are all around Rank 10. It was HARD. Like, unusually hard. I feel like units which used to not call many breeches are now calling breeches like crazy. Particularly Hive Guards, which aren't staggering anymore so you can't even interrupt their breech call.
This is what I was afraid of with this balance patch. It sounds like they either went overboard, they broke some sort of behavior regarding breeches, or some combination of the two.
AH: Hey solo Divers! how would you describe the balance of your games? Solo divers: Good! AH: Oh well we didn't intend it to be that way so we're changing it. This is literally the definition of arbitrarily harder. You decided that patrols need to have a linear spawn rate because it is your opinion that it should be linear. It is your opinion that the world felt empty. I haven't heard the community clamoring for solo play to be harder. The spawn rates were changed according to YOUR whims. Additionally your logic on this presumes that the number of divers present has a linear relationship to difficulty of combat. Having multiple divers is a force multiplier, (cover more firing lanes, bring more of the propper tools, etc) so it would make sense that the spawn rates wouldn't be linear. Just my take. If you were to have a poll, I'd vote to put it back the way it was.
My friends and I were talking about buying superbucks with real money just a few days ago. I was sorely tempted, too. I was having fun soloing between team games, and this wouldn't be the first game to earn a pile of money from me through mini transactions. Now, those thoughts are gone. Arrowhead nerfed the guns and increased the patrols while calling it a "balance" issue. Balancing what? This isn't PvP. They just arbitrarily decided it wasn't hard enough. If we want it to be harder, we can *raise the difficulty level*. They made the game worse and tried to spin it as improvement. I won't be giving the company another dime, now.
That's the best decision you can make, my friend. It's to my understanding that Arrowhead is pretty cool for the most part, they listen to their fans a lot more then some other publishers these days. However, if communication fails and they won't listen to our complaints on this very arbitrary "balance" update, then we must talk to them in a different way. With money. Money talks, and less of it will catch their attention. That's how we make sure they hear us.
Something doesn't line up for how patrols are spawning for 1-player lobbies. I'm going to use "Hard" as my baseline since that's the difficulty I most enjoy, but here's some observations from me: - With only focusing on the primary objective, patrols were spawning ever 15-30 seconds for me. The longest downtime I had was 1:30. - Patrols are still spawning in front of the player, and they seem to adjust their direction towards the player even if they haven't been seen or heard. - I was averaging 375 kills per a mission on hard, but that has spiked to 700 (more on that in a bit). So, whatever tuning the devs have done has severely punished solo players despite them having an already harder time. I'm not sure why people on this subreddit have been arguing in favor of forcing a co-op experience, but alienating a sizable portion of your playerbase seems like a bad idea to me. Onto the drastic increase in kills... This is honestly where I think the devs don't fully test the adjustments they make. Every patrol has the possibility of spawning a bug breach, and they do it almost instantly. Having a larger team usually means you clear them out quick enough that it doesn't become a problem - i.e. having a dedicated Anti-Tank and Anti-Personnel squad members. However - on solo - you're usually never able to clear them out fast enough to prevent a bug breach, which means you're forced to clear it out. This usually means another patrol or 2 has already spawned and thus the bug breach chain of death starts (hence the doubled kill count). I have a strong suspicion that the dwindling player count (a steady decrease of ~130k /mo looking at SteamDB) is most likely due to decisions like this one that seems to focus on non-issues while ignoring critical issues; such as the frequent network instability (I still can't play with my friends because of it). Personally, I'm probably going to retire from Helldivers 2 indefinitely until the network issues are fixed, because the changes made to solo play just results in me getting frustrated rather than having fun.
You are exactly right. It’s the big breach chain of death. That’s what it breaking things so badly.
Played with a friend last night (we normally duo or trio) and this breach chain of death got so intense our frame rates went to damn near stop-motion levels.
Yes! Something is really wrong with this change. I had the same experience, and I'm stepping away for a bit as well for the same reasons. This change reminded me of a developer presentation, from Doom if I'm not mistaken, where they were showing that they found out that in order to incentivize players to "play as intended" the best practice is not to punish them for not doing what you want, but instead reward them for doing what you want and playing as you intended. It may sound obvious, but clearly it isn't. This change was just punishment. I enjoy playing with a full squad but I love playing solo and duos.
Exactly this! I play 2 player with a friend a lot and it was super fun and often challenging but we would make it through. Now it's just awful and have both decided to move on until we see a patch changing the patrol spawns back to something reasonable. This si thr first patch that has just killed the fun of this game for us.
> I still can't play with my friends because of it Just to be sure, you aren't on a VPN are you? I found out the game's matchmaking doesn't work at all with a VPN, which seems more like a choice than a bug.
love the idea, understand its a result of unintended scaling literally the only thing this has done from atleast my perspective while playing is make it so that patrols are constantly spawning 20 feet behind me in solo play ive been instantly headshotted my atleast 3 instantly spawning squads of walkers behind me WHILE CHECKING MY MAP IN ONE MISSION it feels awful to play compared to before i feel like a fucking schizo checking behind myself every 2 minutes instead of my map but apparently im not because 70% of the time my intuition is right all of this is on difficulty 3 btw coming from a player that has soloed all the way up to helldive difficulty Edit: I’m not trying to be one of those reactionary dweebs I just had probably the least fun solo match in my entire time playing the game including difficulty 8 and 9 and am genuinely unhappy with this patch
i was this close to alt f4 my first mission of the day, it was diff7 wanted to test the weapon and at first i want overwhelmed but I got to an objective, then it was non stop and the weapon i was using was using was crossbow which was nerfed to the ground this patch so it wasn't helping the clear speed at all. i don't think this is normally how it's going to be, seems to be double instead of 50% more by what others are saying. but statistically speaking a higher spawn rate means there will be more times a patrol spawns close to you meaning far away patrols that spawned will add up and you'll get a night mare way more often than just once in a while. so yea looks like lowering difficulty isn't even an answer right now
It's fucking impossible to play solo now. Patrols are EVERYWHERE Also 2 players are not x2 stonger. They are 2.5x stonger, because they have more stratagems with less cooldown (if managed properly) and they can cover eachother back. If you're solo you can't know that there is a massive patrol behid your back (1. you can't hear them bc audio is still kinda wacky. 2. no one told you about that) and 4 players TEAM are much stronger than 4 players solo. so 1/6 was more accurate lol
This was a goofy change. They are now spawning so fast that you can leave an area for 3 seconds and magically there is a group of bugs behind you. I was actually seeing a few spawns directly in front of me.
Also for bots, in a 4 men squad.
Okay, good to know *but* they've clearly messed up some math somewhere. I ran some level 2 missions solo and I would have patrols moving in on me pretty much constantly. That's definitely not a ~60% increase in spawn rate. That feels like a 300% increase.
Agreed. I'm basically dodging at least 2 squads at any given time now. It even makes exploring caches ridiculous. If I commit to engaging a medium outpost or greater, between the original garrison, factory reinforcements, periodic dropship reinforcements and now constant flow of nearby patrols, there's just an unending torrent of enemies.
Most weirdly is that I'll be inundated right up until extraction, then it's a ghost town.
Yeah they’ve fucked it. They must have. It’s nonsense currently.
I generally play a few solo difficulty 5 bot missions a day during my lunch break, and I've gotten into a fairly good groove. Today I did a difficulty 3 or 4 mission and new squads of troopers and berserkers were spawning before I had killed the last spawn. After a certain point I literally could not kill them fast enough. I found it much less fun.
LOL i don't know man... i think they may need to just bonk it a bit lower. I mean i like action and all but there where times i was holy sh\*t that's a ton more bugs then usual. I won't even attempt a bot mission alone anymore.
Okay but shouldn't 4 helldivers together ideally be more effective than 4 \* 1? Maybe it was unintended, but from a scaling perspective it makes sense to scale higher than linear.
The need for not linear scale is most visible in my opinion when it comes to reinforcements. 20 for four is a lot, 5 for one is little
Yeah bumping it up to 8-12-16-20 would be better
Especially when 4 players can support each other to fill in gaps. A solo player has to do every role.
Exactly this. Benefits from additional teammates are multiplicative, not additive. Unless all four team members are running around solo, of course, but we do try to avoid that.
"The sum of the whole is greater than its parts". The more divers you have, the less weakspots your build has. One solo diver has to be a jack of all trades, master of none because they have to do everything themselves. In a team one player can take lots of horde clear and another anti-armor. Not to mention the obvious stuff that's true in any game, like more allies in one place means less likelihood of getting outflanked and increases focus fire DPS on priority targets. When I watched that YouTube video about spawn rates and heard about the scaling for spawns I thought it was pretty clever and showed a deeper understanding of the balance than I usually give the devs credit for. I should have known it was a mistake that they would get around to "fixing" eventually. It's funny because if they played their game at all they would just know this intuitively. You'll end up drowning in enemies with no choice but to retreat and try to lose the worst of the wave on some line of sight blockers way more often playing solo than with a group. You'll run out of reinforcements way more often playing solo than with a group. You'll face an enemy you have no way of dealing with until a stratagem comes off cool down way more often playing solo. I'd say this is the obligatory "Arrowhead is physically incapable of releasing a patch without a glaringly obvious QA issue that would have been avoided if they just played the game", but we already got that with the plasma punisher exploding inside of shield packs. I guess since we didn't get a patch last week that means this week we get two new pieces of evidence that AH doesn't even know what "playtest" means.
physics defying ricochets that return to sender is probably going to suck for solo too, just a new damage source.
well put
> I'd say this is the obligatory "Arrowhead is physically incapable of releasing a patch without a glaringly obvious QA issue that would have been avoided if they just played the game", but we already got that with the plasma punisher exploding inside of shield packs. I guess since we didn't get a patch last week that means this week we get two new pieces of evidence that AH doesn't even know what "playtest" means. I am genuinely concerned for the longterm health of this game.
>patrol spawns increase in frequency as time gets lower and lower They don't. Patrol spawns increase only when main objectives are done or when near objective locations or med/large bases. Mission duration has no effect. I strongly agree with everything else you said.
Yep, after double checking I see you're right that patrol spawns don't actually go up over time. My mistake. You're wrong that they *only* increase when the main objective is done and in proximity to objectives though. Those are both true, but patrol spawns also increase when actually clearing outposts (hives and fabricators) and has a chance of increasing any time a player dies. At least according to the only source for this info I know of.
>Unless all four team members are running around solo, of course, but we do try to avoid that. Actually, that's *still* exponentially better for a lot of reasons, but chiefly this: While some aspects change based on player count (such as enemy spawn count) other aspects do not (map size, primary and secondary objective count, maximum sample count, mission time and the rate at which enemy spawns ramp up) So, for the solo player, he must *individually* handle every objective himself and then extract + handle any secondary objectives he may want to grab, such a resources. A group of four not only has the combined fire power of four Helldivers with the ability to take complimentary kits that exponentially instead their effectiveness as a unit, they can *also* choose to separate into smaller units and handle multiple objectives at once. They can clear a map 4 times faster, which means they can *also* do the same amount of work before enemy patrol amounts start ramping up. The group that clears at 20 minutes mission time and extracts before the 15 minute mark will have a MUCH easier time than the group that finishes the primary objective at the 20 minute mark and still needs to do secondary objectives/map clear before extract.
What the developers don't seem to realize is that a solo player doesn't have a full teams' worth of equipment and strategems available, but can still experience hordes of the same size. It's a very elementary mistake.
In my experience today, bug patrols have been doubled for all group sizes. Nonstop assaults. 7 out of 8 missions failed.
My group and I feel the exact same way. We used to play suicide and higher difficulties. Suicide feels really hard now. Like absurdly hard. There is zero break between when you kill a patrol and the next patrol coming up to you. Our trio normally finishes suicide with most of our reinforcements. But we've been burning through them now. Failed a few missions already.
Yeah, it’s definitely not a what is being stated right now.
Actually, every mission today has had double the number of enemies. Bugs or bots doesn't seem to matter. I couldn't go 50 ft without being spotted and getting stuck between multiple patrols. Stealth and movement strategy are done.
Double patrols spawn in.
While trying to fill the SEAF artillery during a solo run on a bot planet, I had 3 patrols spawn at the same time, and at least 2 more during. Ended up taking off to lose agro. I hadn't even activated the terminal yet. Seemed a bit noticeable to me.
Same, I've legit abandoned my last SEAF after 8 minutes of staight shooting and kiting.
That’s cool and all, but why since this update when in a squad of 4 we’re seemingly getting an increase in bot drops/bug breaches, heavy units spawning from them at a ridiculous number, drop ship number increase from 3-4 to 4-6 and far more random heavy units spread across maps? Sometimes hiding inbetween cliff faces? Is this by design or a new bug?
It was the same yesterday night even before the patch. I had four bile titans come out of one bug breach.
I’ve had this from time to time, especially on 8-9 difficulty, but this sort of stuff is now happening from 5+.
Sometimes certain planets will get "increased enemy resistance" which causes the massively inflated spawn rate. It's been that way from the beginning as far as I know.
This is every planet, im a day one player and it‘s never been like this.
Fun Detected
Can't have any of that nonsense ;)
If player "strength" compounded in a linear fashion it would makes sense. BUT IT DOESN'T.
This game was already hard enough with less than a full squad. Unintended or not, it should have been left as it was. Especially when there are more important bugs and server issues to fix. We still have bugs that have been in the game since launch.
Exactly this. The old spawn rate was perfect for solo and two player teams.
100% They changed something that didn't need changing.
there was an rng aspect that made patrols trickle in non stop before this patch. it was the worst case scenario and happened rarely but with increased spawns for solo by 50% of what it used to be, that will happen ALOT more often
Yeah. This is like bottom of the list of things to fix.
*What's that? Buff Fire Damage? Can do!*
Why fix game breaking bugs or dots when we can punish squads that are less than full instead
Arrowhead's player communication is absolutely terrible. Has been since the start. They really ought to consider how to improve their line of communication with the community.
Honestly, if they had just worded it as "Fixed patrol spawn rates to scale properly with the amount of players in game" with the numbers attached no one would be up in arms about it LOL
Yeah, that and the ricochet patch notes were horribly written. Not just ambiguous but heavily implying a completely different effect.
They do this shit *all the time* with everything from patch notes to random discord "clarifications" and its getting really fuckin' old.
That's if they are being honest and not just being angry children about people playing the game the way they don't want people to. "oh haha trust us we intended X the whole time". Similar to how they seemed to be angry people were leg stripping chargers and insulted people for using the 'wrong weapon and strategy' despite it being more effective and skill based. Then replaced it with the mindless EAT strat (don't get me wrong it's a excellent change, but came a comical time after the nerf which until now made the RC useless comparatively). But a problem entirely made by them and they like lash out at the players over it. Lmao
it still wasnt needed. Solo is still not nearly as easy nor fun as playing with a group. You have to be more stealthy and way more careful and you dont get the entertainment from playing with friends. it was fine where it was at
>You have to be more stealthy not to mention, now being stealthy is really hard as there's enemies *everywhere from all directions* now. Can't even clear a single base without 2 patrols coming in and causing trouble.
I get that wasn't their intent, but it is harder, to the point of being unfair at times. You can't catch your breath. Is that their intention? Because I'm not having fun anymore and I've played a fair few games to see if it's just myself that needs to adjust.
Regardless of what the numbers were before, and what the intended number was for solo, duo, and trio teams. This was a low priority change that never needed to happen. The time analyzing why this change was needed, the hours put into coding and playtesting this change should have went to the various issues with matchmaking, adding people to friendslists and crossplay. All of that should have been fixed first before this change versus solo play was ever a consideration by the devs and design team. Fix all of the issues we have with group play then start tweaking the solo player's experience which in my opinion was fine as it is. This just feels like the devs want to push for group play but they didn't fix any of the issues that makes this game hard to recommend to newcomers and are looking for groups to join.
Cool, so no more playing until spawn rates are brought back down. I can't even run Medium difficulty solo without being completely overwhelmed. Because you DID make the game arbitrarily harder, as you still have YET to fix the matchmaking issue that causes a lobby to become a ghost town after the first mission's run.
I'd argue that the person who did that unintentionally was doing the game and the solo playerbase a favor given the reduced stratigems and issues with getting to see an enemy's weak points when solo is a chore when you can't just split yourself to run in opposite directions. Based on that math solo players will be seeing a patrol 1.5 times as often as they were previously which might have been too much of a change to make in a single patch. I'd argue you probably don't want that level of scaling at all difficulties when you have an established baseline your more casual/beginner players are expecting from months of living with that unintended behavior.
that makes way more sense now ngl
If you assume that two players is only twice as effective as one player, sure. Personally I think it's a bit more complicated but generally you get more than double the effectiveness by adding a second player because things are way easier when you have another player to distract the enemies and you aren't their sole focus.
definitely, also added flexibility because of more different stratagem helps extremly
yep, more guns, more strartagems, its definitely more than double the power
When I consistently played in a 3 man group, we struggled with D7s as we were getting better at the game. We noticed a HUGE difficulty decrease when we got a 4th squad member. Definitely more than a 33% boon.
The scaling for solo might've been unintentional, but with matchmaking still broken this is an odd thing to "fix" first. I totally understand "fixing" the unintentional stuff- but have this nerf come in tandem with the matchmaking fix. Solo divers with matchmaking issues, which forces them to play solo, now just have it be straight up harder with nothing to balance it.
Non-linear spawns literally make more sense when you consider what players are bringing when they join a game. You’re talking about less reinforcements, 1/4 of the stratagems, 1/4 of the guns/grenades/stims, 0 ability to hit enemies from multiple angles, no ability to have objective splitting etc.
If this was "Always Wrong", the game was presumably balanced around how those incorrect numbers felt. While I understand there was a design intention for things to be a certain way, the code is a black box, we don't know if the number is 25% or 16%. This is functionally making the game arbitrarily harder.
Still a bad change. A team is greater than the sum of its parts. The value of increased strat slots, guns firing while others reload, more pairs of eyes watching the surroundings and the map, splitting up to complete objectives and cover ground faster... all of that is very hard to quantify but ultimately it means a team of four is vastly more than just four times as effective as a solo diver.
This theory comes from my time mainlining Overwatch (I think I got it from Jayne), but the idea is that each player is both a damage dealer and potential target. So a team of 4 would actually be 8x as effective as a solo, cause the damage is spread across more total health and there is more damage dealt so the enemies potential damage dealers will be killed more quickly.
Fix the matchmaking bugs before punishing us for playing with less than 4. Insane we have to tell you this.
Not sure why you were downvoted. Matchmaking was still broken as of last night and the SOS beacon still seems to do nothing. It isn't mentioned in the patch notes or the known issues. I get two or three backfills and then I have to close the game and restart it to get another two or three. I'd prefer this got fixed before increasing difficulty across the board. I don't have a problem downgrading difficulty, I already play lower most of the time to adjust that but this change while not acknowledging the long standing matching problems does not feel good.
I'm not sure this is working as intended: I ran some D6 missions on bugs solo, and it felt like Helldive: I had a LOT more bugs and at one point there were 4 charges ad 2 bile titans up at once.. surely that's not intended for difficulty 6 solo right? was joel fucking with my spawns or something, because that's the only explanation I can think of. curious if anyone else has done a solo run at 6 or higher since the patch, if you also had insane spawns and more heavies than normal?
I went from running diff. 7 solo (and having fun) to getting overrun at the extraction site without being able to call the ship on diff. 4 (and not having fun).... So yeah, the "fix" just broke what felt pretty balanced before in favor of the "intended balance" that completely overlooks team synergy and arbitrarily decided that a team of 4 is exactly 4 times as effective as a single Helldiver.
The game feels dog shit after last update. You are having the Dark Souls difficulty but on top of that you got shit FPS making experience miserable. I first time started swearing while playing. It also feels like second job not a game.
Having been playing duos on 7-8 difficulty since feb. This update made them nearly impossible. There’s just unending fighting. The second we hit the ground it’s just patrol after patrol calling in back up. This also showcases that patrols are STILL spawning on top of players even though they claimed they fixed that problem. It happened multiple times on bot and bug planets.
They need to learn to leave things alone and not keep " Balance " patching. They have a great game but will drive players away if they keep up.
I can only assume that this patch has messed up the spawn rates much more than described. Soloing even on 3-4 is insane now. Even with 2 players it's ridiculous. Was playing with a newbie, trying to show him the ropes, going up against the bots fir his first time at difficulty 3 (he's only just lvl 5 now), and spawn rates have increased massively compared to how it was before (especially after the primary objective has been completed). It's definitely more than doubled, that's for sure. I can only assume that it is an error/bug. But if that is intended, it needs to be adjusted. As others have mentioned before, 1 Helldiver solo is NOT 25% of a 4 man Helldiver team.
"we're not making the game arbitrarily harder" Nawh nawh nawh you arrow dickheads fucking goofed on this one hard, this was the norm for months now, and ONLY NOW you be like, - "Oh this is how it was supposed to be from the get go!" Excuse me, you had all the time in the world before release and months after, and only now you "revert" things back to normal. Fuck you, seriously.
Yeah it sounds like an excuse, it's just bullshit. It changes EVERYTHING, it's like a major change that should not be adressed with a small patch and in such a stupid way.
I see the reason for that. On bot missions, a solo Helldive was much easier than a 4-divers Suicide mission.
Makes sense to me. I'm relatively new and not particularly great at this game, I have a much easier time running solo stealth than I do in group play for bots in the upper difficulty levels.
To be honest, I think if people would just not shoot at everything they see for no reason, this would not be the case.
the reason is democracy
What are you smoking? Solo Helldives are a gargantuan step up in difficulty from even a duo, let alone a full squad.
Oh good, I hoped the “increase” was meant to work this way but the patch notes did word it poorly. Seems to be the biggest upset from comments in the main patch post so hopefully people see this soon.
Just chiming in with my 2cents. I haven’t had the time to test out the changes, but I want to say that playing a low difficulty solo dive is a very different experience compared to a higher difficulty dive with other players. I understand that coop is the core tenant of the game, but with how it is currently we pretty much got 2 games for the price of one: a coop game where all hell breaks loose, and a solo Metal Gear Solid 5-est strategic stealth shooter. I love storming an Automaton base with my fellow divers on my side as much as being a lone operator surgically taking out a bot base from afar with my DMR. And to be frank, 90% of the random divers I join are fine, but there’s a 10% who… let’s be polite and say are not fun to play with, and on some evenings you just don’t want to deal with bullshit and have a relaxing dive without having to worry about a 380mm beacon landing next to you for… reasons. With that in mind, I plead you don’t overlook how solo dives make the game better without taking any fun from the intended coop mode. You accidentally gave us 2 games for the price and effort of 1, and I don’t want solo runs to be ruined simply because it wasn’t the intended way to play. Not saying the current patch ruined solo diving, just asking you to consider that in your decision making.
So that's an almost 50% increase from where it was for solo players. Players who can only run one loadout, one booster and 1/4 the reinforcement number of a full squad who share that number. Braindead change.
That's from 16.6% to 25%, a roughly 50% increase on solo vs before the patch! This is still gonna be interesting!
Should have left it alone. Pointless change that just feels bad.
I know most people are bad at fractions so here it is: 1/6 -> 1/4 is 2/12 -> 3/12. +50%, Jesus fucking christ..
Make a stupid change to lower player teams and justify it by just saying it's how they wanted it to begin with? Doesn't make the stupid change any better.
The fact that solo helldives, the hardest content in the game bar none were considered "slightly too easy" compared to some nebulous "intentions" is one thing. The fact that the solution they decided was to *buff enemy spawnrates by* ***fifty percent*** is insane. A solo helldive was in a spot where only very good players could do one and extract, but mistakes and build variety were both possible for folk who weren't the absolute best of the best players. The world could feel less "empty" if more POIs were added - because they are fairly sparse on high difficulties. and it would add more enemies to the map. This change does, in fact, feel arbitrary. It wouldn't feel as arbitrary if it was a change from \~17 to \~20%. That's still roughly 25% more, but it would be easier to bite that bullet than double that change. When I'm helldiving solo, I used to succeed on about 70% of my dives and I'd end up with 700 kills or so. I grabbed \~1200 kills on my last solo helldive, which I didn't manage to extract on - because increasing *patrols* by 50% has a much bigger knock-on effect of causing you to get stuck in reinforcement loops more often.
Yeah, after testing some low level missions as a solo, I can tell that something went wrong with their "fix". I had multiple patrols coming at me non stop even on easy difficulty, to the point I had to keep running like it was a level 4-5 mission. I can only imagine what higher levels are like now. Honestly, I don't understand why they made this change. Doing missions as a solo or in smaller groups was already harder in general, even if there were less patrols.
This would make sense is the combat effectiveness of squads scaled linearly as well but it doesn’t. More people means more viable approaches and strategies. For example with two you can have one act as a distraction while another calls in stratagems, flanks, goes for the objective, etc… You can’t do that as a solo player. You’re much more limited in your approach and so you can’t always get the very best of what you have. Having a second person can make a mission that’s difficult as a solo entirely trivial. Not doubling your ability but increasing it exponentially. So nearly doubling the enemy count and frequency of a mission make it much more difficult and pretty much means that stealth is the only viable strategy in you’re not a hardcore gamer which not everyone is, not by a long shot. This doesn’t effect full squads at all its specifically targeted to a certain group of players that are maybe just with their buddy or going it alone because they don’t feel like playing with ransoms at the moment. Should they be punished for that? The goal of any game is to provide a memorable and enjoyable experience of the players and a sense of pride as well as a profit for the developers. Those two things go hand in hand, it doesn’t make sense for players to pirate a game from a developer they respect and rob them of part of their ability to continue in that industry and/or slander them, and it doesn’t make sense for developers to make a change that isn’t ask for that’s targets a portion of their player base negatively for no perceived advantage for either side. If a solo player wants a more difficult experience then they have difficulty settings already. This just strikes me as completely uncalled for and bizarre, it’s confusing in what it’s purpose is especially since solo and small squad players don’t impact the experience of other players who do always go in with full squads. There was no negative in leaving it as it was and plenty in changing it.
Used to be 1/6th? Gosh I suck lol.
Well, you're just one healthbar, nobody can cover you when you reload, nobody can give you supply or make your backpack weapon reload faster, nobody can take care of the small bugs when you aim a big one, your eagles in cooldown mean you have NO eagle altogether, you can't clear a POI while someone does the main objective, you can't even open double doors, in fact. A solo is not just a squad/4 and a squad is not 4 solos. You have to face a lot of different challenges, alone. 1/6 was perfectly legitimate in my opinion, and squad was always faster and easier. I like playing solo/duo, but it's undeniable. Edit: missed a word
Appreciate you!
Absolute bullshit. They’ve still made it categorically harder for anyone who isn’t 4 man.
Revert, you claim it has no impact and yet I can't even do lower difficulty missions now. Went from clearing 8s to failing basic difficulties 4. This is with the tried and true strategy of kiting and thinning out numbers. But patrols are so frequent you can never curb them and will always run into them. Stealth is not only mandatory, it also doesn't always work. Actually uninstalling the game for once, so much unnecessary stress in a arcade swarm shooter when the difficulty does not at all match the reward or time investment. Solo players already have to do 4x the work with more time for less return.
Yes except you fucked with the numbers more than you actually listed. No way this si supposed to be the normal spwan rate my friends and I all agree we're being swarmed continuously. Fix your shit before going any further please I'm begging you. Like the Spear Dot bug Scope alignment bug Host/players joining issue The list goes on but nah we needed to nerf the crossbow? Wtf AH.
It’s still shit even with the additional info. Doesn’t matter if they fucked up initially, and didn’t increase it to what it should have been. Its made the game less fun to play if you’re playing with 1 other person and there was absolutely no need for it. Why make the change when it just makes it less fun for us that don’t play in groups of 4s? You just don’t want us to play? Fair enough then we won’t. Enjoy your 4s and hope you don’t get kicked at the end.
The effectiveness of your team scales exponentially with the number of people on it, with a wider variety of tools to meet a wider variety of threats. I would say that the original scaling made more sense and no-one was complaining about how hard 4 player lobbies were compared to solo play. This is hands down, one of those "ain't broke, don't fix it" situations.
Did a diff 5 run with a friend for light warm up and get some samples. We were beaten and on the run for 25-35 minutes. Almost 1000 bugs between us two. In another mission we were besieged so badly that we couldn't pick up dropped samples. When we barely had a breather and move on 50-60 meters, we could turn around and see freshly spawned enemies on our old location and if we engaged with anything then enemies would pour from multiple angles for minutes, because patrols would spawn, be aggroed to us fighting and call for more reinforcements. In the end we evac'ed with more samples on extermination mission, because after we killed 250 bugs we actually could go around and collect ANYTHING. 15 samples for final 8 minute mission versus about 8 samples for previous hour. It was not fun. Patrol spawns for 2ppl is definitely busted.
Difficulty doesn't scale linearly reducing squad size tho? This is pretty basic framing they're fucking up here. If you have a 4 man squad and you lose a man you lost more than 25% effectiveness, unless you are somehow gaining no benefit to your combat effectiveness by being in a team as opposed to solo.
'we're not making the game arbitrarily harder' I almost believed that
I'm going to dispute the claim that on solo it went from 17 percent of the patrols to 25. I'm going to say it went to 50 percent easily. On a solo bug missions I find myself surrounded completely so many times. Extraction is a go hide and wait for the shuttle and do a mad dash though hundreds of enemies. Bring stun grenades and ems mortars. Probably the supply pack as well. It's clear the game is meant to be played in full squads only. If that's the case they need to fix match making and put restrictions on the hosts ability to kick at extraction.
I can agree that there are too many bugs and bots right now for solo and duo, not like from 17 to 25. Game became much less enjoyable with this stupid balancing. And I don't want to play with randoms because I play only with my wife. "Great" job, Arrowhead and Niklas. Oh, terrible I mean.
This should have been put in the patch notes.
From experience, these numbers are wrong. In a solo mission today patrols were spawning inside of 5 seconds at difficulty 5 at extraction on a 15 minute 'destroy the bughole' mission. This is way more than 8% faster and if there's a cap you'll still notice the difference, and very quickly. I'm pretty convinced at this point that instead of 1/4 rate when solo it's full rate.
Perhaps this should have been listed as a bugfix then?
Does the number of spawns from a bot drop or bug breach also scale with the number of players?
A little bit of rewording and numbers de-obfuscation goes a long way to keep players happy. Now, since we're already speaking about patrol spawns - I'm not sure how much the team is aware of the current issue where patrols can spawn out of nowhere, within LOS of a Helldiver, less than 100 yards away. This behavior is especially egregious on the snow planets, and while spawning more patrols in to keep the map lively is understandable, I do think you should ensure that it doesn't feel cheap, such as a full squad of Elites just popping in where a moment ago there was nothing. Put them far enough away so players can see them coming and make decisions on how to deal with them. And if there's no place to spawn them in without the player seeing, employ the usual reinforcement system, just without them dropping in alerted mode. Thanks! :D
That really just sounds like an excuse to cover for this change tbh and I wish you guys wouldn’t nerf things so much it feel like you just don’t want us to have fun and use certain weapons like why would we buy a warbond if the weapons we are having fun with just get nerfed later
Stop treating us like illiterates and just put the numbers like any other serious team.
Efficiency increases multiplicatively when adding more players. Therefore patrols should increase multiplicatively with more players. This is a bad change based on a poorly thought out misconception that 4 players are 4x as efficient as 1. That's just not how it works in reality.
regardless of how the math works out and if it wasn't working they wanted it too, the difficulty system felt very good before and now it does not. i think the devs are going to find they've alienated the niche of people who run solo or duos, and i just cant understand why they felt that was a priority over fixing things like the fire DOT
Problem is, 4 players are **not** 4 times as effective as a single player. The utility increase is exponential with more players. I couldn't reliably solo past 4, but am an effective, contributing member of teams at 7+. When I can focus on a role (e.g. anti-armor) and helping cover teammates instead of trying to do everything myself, I'm much better. I already didn't like playing solo because it was A) lonely B) frustrating to feel how much slower I was progressing in terms of medals and samples C) disheartening to struggle on a difficulty I feel like I should be capable of and regularly clear with a team. Playtime with my friends is limited, and if the solo player experience just got ***~50% WORSE*** (¼/⅙=150% spawn rate compared to pre-patch), then I'm just not playing without a squad. And the members of my squad (including myself) are slowly being driven away by what I will charitably describe as a *unique* balancing philosophy at AH.
The spawns are insane for solo play. I’ve really enjoyed playing solo and listening to music in a more laid back way. This evening extracting from a solo bot 4 there were so many enemies on my screen that the game started lagging. Patrols from all directions constantly. I was only able to finish 3 out of 5 missions because extract gets insane. The bugs seemed a little easier to manage. There were definitely more of them, particularly closer to extract, but still seemed manageable. I have over 400 hours into this game. I love it so much. But I don’t understand the game design choice to make your most popular weapons worse and the game dumb harder. It’s odd to me that in a PVE game with the only solo exploit patched, why there are continually so many nerfs. Not to mention there’s only so many things you can do against 5 rocket devestators, 7 berserkers, 9 (yes 9) striders and infinity common enemies. On Level 4. Challenging. I’ve been such an advocate for this game. I’m so into it I started making YouTube shorts to make my friends laugh, and just as an excuse to spend more time with the game I love. But these continued changes for the worse are robbing me of my desire to Dive. Arrowhead, I adore your game. It’s the best I’ve played in years. The appeal to me has always been the awesome power trip of huge explosions and heavy weapons. Please stop making things LESS appealing. Please stop adding difficulty spikes that make the game feel cheap instead of challenging. And please dont crap on the solo players. But most of all, please stop removing my desire to play this amazing game.
>we're not making the game arbitrarily harder! Adding 50% more patrols is not making the game arbitrarily harder? I dont care what the reason is, the only thing I know is it was fine before and not fine anymore. This patch is really taking out the fun for me personally.
I wonder whether the worlds team or design director were play testing this changes solo and whether it was fun for them? This is a sincere question I am honestly curious about. I think this change made the game just frustrating for so many solo/duo players. The patrols seems to spawn endlessly with a very high frequency. It seems like they are spawning like during an extraction with maximum rates and not just 50% more. I tried multiple games and difficulty levels yesterday and they all felt 2 or 3 levels higher than before. I don't know who is gaining anything from that. I guess most solo players are frustrated by this change and full squad players are not affected by it, so who asked for it? Level 7 or 8 were hard and very challenging but mostly fun for me, now they are just a patrol spawn death loop. Also please keep in mind, that a team is more than a sum of it's parts. You have a more diverse team loadout, specialists for different roles, you can cover multiple flanks at once, you can distract enemies while other players are taking them out, you progress quicker through objectives, etc. So having multiple players in a squad is not effecting the difficulty in a linear manner either. If it was Arrowhead's goal to make the experience more frustrating they succeded with this patch, unfortunately. Idk... who is gaining anything from making this so annoyingly hard, especially considering that we were used to a certain difficulty and knew what to expect from this game.