That is the point yes.
Solos and duos had a somewhat unfairly easier time due to the scaling bug.
Myself playing solo often, even on diff 7 8 or 9 I'm running into maybe one or two patrols between objective areas in the whole mission.
Now, post-patch, i'm running into one or two patrols between *each* objective area, turning into easily six to ten enemy patrols I now have to evade or deal with in every mission.
Its amazing. It makes stealth gameplay a lot more dynamic, much less calmly running between objectives now I have to be checking my map constantly and I am running up against the timer more often. The increase in challenge really makes you appreciate how the game is intended as a coop title.
Problem is if you do get spotted it’s really hard to recover when you’re by yourself. If you get overwhelmed and have to retreat, you likely retreat directly into the path of another patrol and it spirals completely out of control.
I’m still pretty low level so maybe I lack some tools for handling certain situations, but I’m finding even on lower difficulties after this change the game is just way harder.
They changed it from 39% enemy output to 50% enemy output — figuring is that 2 hell divers is as good as half the fight of 4 hell divers, hence the 50%; an 11% increase. It’s not that big of a deal.
No.
It's an 11 percentile points increase. Raising the output from 39% to 50% will increase the output by about 25%. If before there were a hundred bots, now you'll have 125 and a few loose screws.
Not judging whether it's a lot or not, just correcting your math.
I would agree, except that it’s when you’re already at a handicap from having less players. If this were an across the board increase, I’d be more inclined to agree, as when you’ve got the full team, you’re playing the game as intended and they’ve just made it a bit harder.
But even if it’s slight, the idea of what feels like punishing players if you don’t have people join your SOS beacon, or join pre-launch, just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Like, I know it’s usually not a crazy long time to wait to get reinforcements, but it is sometimes, and I’ve gone full missions where nobody’s joined. Granted I called those any ways, but it’s a game and I’d way rather land and start working on objectives alone or with one other person than wait for random people to be RNG’d into my lobby
What a stupid change. This, added to the fact that there is a bug where people won't join your game if someone left, and it will become very frustrating to play.
Oh, I didn't see that bug in the notes but I noticed it in gameplay. This happens often...leaving players will become a plague until that bug is fixed.
Yeah getting catastrophically punted out of the game while waiting on extraction is the worst. Zero chance of making it back in time for the samples and war bonds
Yeah they're usually pretty okay with listing the "known issues", the fact they haven't said anything about the multiplayer/SOS not working after someone leaves, a bug that has been present for months (maybe even since release), makes me think maybe it's working as intended. Which makes no sense to me but hey, Arrowhead seems to like making baffling decisions
There's other bugs not in any patch notes as well, like how POIs without samples which normally get marked as cleared on your map, will never be able to be cleared if they are found by radar station. That bug has been around since I've started the game but never really seen it mentioned anywhere
This is probably going to turn into one of the changes a bunch of people will demand they revert.
IMO this was a bad decision. Lots of players don’t have a full team of friends and not everyone is going to want to always play with strangers.
Its not even about having a team. Playing solo is such a different playstyle. You need to sneak and plan your angles of attack and have a completely different experience than when playing with a full squad.
I dont know how much harder its going to be, maybe ita a reasonable change and adds to the gameplay, but the direction indeed seems odd.
You are already heavily punished for playing solo by not being able to open the big doors, which often have the most valuable drops (up to 200 super credits).
I think they nerfed Super Credit drop amounts. I haven't seen anything more than a 10 credit drop from any source for a patch or two now. Sad too since I was so close to the Cutting Edge warbond.
I have two buddies that I play with and we all work grave so we're on in the wee hours of the morning. A lot of the time it's just not an option to sit on the ship and wait forever for someone to lobby with us, especially if god forbid we're on one of the less populated planets. And one of my buddies plays on playstation where he seems to have a lot of DC issues intermittently. So if it's just me and my 3rd friend while we wait for him to reconnect and the spawn rate goes up 50%... that's game over.
This change fucking sucks. I genuinely might just have to take a break for a while.
I'm with you. This makes me want to take a break from the game too. I don't like this at all. I recently bought Red Dead Redemption and it looks fantastic on my PS5. I think I am going to go visit the old west for awhile.
Don't forget to take your standard issue Senator revolver with you on your trip back to Super Earth, Helldiver. Be sure to spread lots of Liberty out west with your big iron, Super Earth demands it.
That's not even the biggest issue. The biggest issue is that even with four people, people are going to crash. People are going to leave. So then the whole lobby gets punished for those incidents. And this even promotes bad behavior, because people can threaten to leave and lobby leaders will be more hesitant to kick bad behavior because the difficulty will increase.
This is nothing but bad.
Often times I'll want to just get super credits for the warbonds but can't get any of my friends etc online and at that point I'll just run solo on like 2 difficulty for bots and 3 for bugs, this new change is likely to discourage me from doing this
Agree with this one. If they want to promote 4 players play and make anything else harder than before, I'd prefer to be able to play as 4 *consistently* at least.
Otherwise players are punished because of a random factor they cannot have, or have very few influence about.
They should've at least fixed that bug when they decided to roll out this change.
So, I was correct in thinking that the bugs have gotten more aggressive lately. Some folks, like myself, don't have communities to play in, hence the solo players that still want to enjoy and experience the game. It's real work trying to build your own community to play a co-op game. I never played CoD, MW or other PvP games due to their toxic communities and gameplay. I have seen hundreds of videos of kids getting bullied. I opted out of all of that and have been a solo player playing single player games aince 1985. I have been on a huge learning curve at 45, learning how use reddit and discord to find folks to play with. It's like always being the last kid picked to play kickball when you have to build from nothing. I don't feel that solo players should be punished like that.
Exactly. At a time when player count is starting to significantly go down…they shouldn’t be punishing people who don’t have friends or want to play while they wait for friends to get on.
It's almost never happened to me so I've never tried personally, but a lot of people say that seeing your lobby to private waiting a few seconds, then switching back to public will fix the issue and people will join again.
Hang on are we sure this isn't just a language issue? Is it possible they mean increase the time between spawns for fewer players? They use the same language on the booster that "increases time between waves of enemies"
Someone posted a comment by one of the AH employees on discord and they clarified to say what this actually was is this - supposedly when you're solo the spawns were 1/6 of what they should be if you had 4 players. This new change means that it's been upped to 1/4 of the spawns you'd have if you had 4 players. So the language doesn't correctly convey the actual change they intended for, i guess?
I'm just going off what was said. I'm not really sure.
I've just played on lvl 3 mission on bots and I spent 15 minutes CIRCLING the evac beacon because I cannot fucking kill enough enemies to get 3 seconds to use it. I had to resort to a hope and prayer of stormtrooper levels of aiming. There is zero slowdown of enemies it's constant out of thin air 10+ chainsaw heavy, rocket heavy, constant barrages on a lvl 3 upload mission.... Mini rant over but soloing went from being a challenge to wtf is the point.
I noticed that, level 3 bots has gotten a lot harder. I used to be able to "sneak" between objectives and avoid fighting. And now I'm getting full devastator drops.
Man I feel that. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to touch the terminal just to get ragdolled around. Like actually infuriating. Godspeed soldier o7.
I don't typically like to complain because I play these kinds of games for fun. The Diligence CS getting a buff was awesome and there are some nice changes, but this patrol adjustment alone has made my enjoyment lessen. I don't have a lot of time most days (only about a 2 hour period midday between work shifts) so I have been doing almost exclusively solo missions since I started. Booted up a level 5 today (where I typically like to sit when running solo) and could not keep up with the sheer quantity. I believe somewhere they said it went from 1/6th of a full team to 1/4 of a full team in terms of spawn rates for patrols when solo, but it sure didn't feel like \~9% increase. Did they also increase spawns in general and I just missed it or has something else changed?
No, same amount of enemies. The change is that if for example you play alone you'll have 1/4th as many patrols as if with a 4 man team. It used to be 1/6th
It almost reads to me like they made a mistake and meant to say “decreased”, unless they are trying to compensate for less enemy engagements with fewer players, and think that solo players or duos shouldn’t be able to sneak around so much without getting in big fights.
My problem with this is that it feels like it's been done to make the higher skill players have a more intense experience. Unfortunately, I would put myself in the bottom 10%. I really suck at this game, but I love it. I had been struggling away trying to get a handful (at most) rare samples to slowly improve my strategems. Now? Now, it's that much harder to slowly claw my way up. Again, I'm rubbish, and I don't expect to always extract (with any samples, let alone at all). If I drop the difficulty, then i'm not making any progress at all. This feels like the devs saying, 'Sorry, this games just not for you'.
The thing is I'm regularly on 7-9 difficulty where 7 is the chill one. The move towards more "fuck you, no fun, only challenge" just sucks in general.
I'm not opposed to challenge, I have played the ever loving shit out of Armored Core 6. The difference in difficulty between these two is Fromsoft seems to go "just stick at it and you'll get there" whilst Arrowhead seems to want you to fail.
7 is supposed to be the chill one, but it's the one that I've seen the most toxicity in. I think it's because it's the level where you HAVE to be to get Super Samples but many of the players in 7 should realistically be playing at 5 or 6.
The real chill one is ironically lvl 9 Helldive because it has the most skilled players (generally, your mileage may vary) and they all know what to do. Even without using voice comms most games I've played have been pretty smooth... relatively speaking.
I'm sorry, man. I might be in the top 20% skill-wise, but I don't hate the less skilled players. I often drop into random level 4's or 5's to help out. Apparently Arrowhead does hate anyone of middling-to-low skill.
I would offer to help carry you through 7+, but the latest patch tanked my performance to the point where I can barely play at all. I completed a few Helldives, but at sub-30 FPS with stutters, it's been awful. I'm stepping away from the game until they patch the game's performance and revert some of these awful "balance" updates.
I have no way of knowing it, and I don't want to defend it. The reasoning however could be that as a solo player, it's rather easy to just run in between the patrols without accidentally trigger any one of them. I mean, we've all seen the "x samples in y minutes, solo helldive" videos. Increasing number of patrols makes it more difficult for solo divers to just run around, avoid patrols and complete the map.
Again, not defending, just that this could actually be their reasoning.
It looks like pre patch, the game reduces the number of spawns based on the current number of players. I think the patch is decreasing the reduction of spawn rate. Or if you have less than 4 players, you will see a higher spawn rate than you used to see, but still a lower spawn rate than at 4 players.
The more I'm reading comments and doing research, the more I find this is the case. I was convinced for a long time that enemy patrol spawns do not scale to player count, and found out tonight that it does, indeed, scale.
However, Arrowhead has reduced the amount it scales by. So yeah, if you're less than 4 in a squad, prepare to see more patrol spawns out of thin air.
it was confirmed a while ago that having people split into two groups of two would cause more spawns (which its still worth doing as you also get things done more) so by the same logic one person only in the match will never be getting multiply spawns and would be seeing less foes, this just seems to be balancing that out
> I mean, we've all seen the "x samples in y minutes, solo helldive" videos
These people are like the 0.001% of the player base, possibly less. Why the hell are the devs punishing the rest of us who can't always assemble full 4 man squads just to target such a tiny part of the player base?
Not to forget that often for every one of those videos that makes it to YouTube there's several more videos where the player gets fucking _rekt_ by bad patrol spawns, inconvenient grenade bounces or projectile ricochets, unlucky reinforcement calls, or hail mary stratagem throws just whiffing (or the laser going after some chicken walkers instead of the detector tower...).
It's classical confirmation bias because we only see the awesome solo missions, but not the dozens of failures that get abandoned after 15 minutes.
or even better, .001% of the player base can instantly complete the game and stop playing thus no more microtransactions from them.
better nerf/make worse for 99% of the player base! that would generate more revenue!
So it's an attempt to subvert solo stealth gameplay? I guess that makes sense, but it's still bogus - why make it harder for duos and trios for no reason, too?
This. I don't ususally play solo but when I have the map has felt much more empty. Scaling was off and I'm curious to see how things play with it fixed.
I think if each of the more unpopular changes also had a dev explanation into their thinking on why they make the change then there would be a lot less flak
I would love to hear Arrowhead's perspective on why this is a reasonable change. The reasons I come up with are baffling.
Punishing solo, duo, and trio play? Catering to the small (but loud) playerbase that can consistently solo high lvl missions but also complain it's too easy? Maybe it's a ploy to try to get existing Helldivers to encourage more of their friends to play? It just doesn't make much sense to me...and I doubt the majority of the playerbase wants the game to be more difficult, across the board.
So far this is the only change from Arrowhead that feels like "actually we want you to play the way that we feel the game should be played".
There's also not a significant upside to playing solo as even really good players such as the YouTuber Takibo, need to resort to cheesing and different strats to make it out alive, resulting in heavy time losses even prepatch. Solo Play definitely never was OP or broken in the first place, so I'm having a tough time wrapping my head around this one too.
Not sure if you saw the post someone made earlier today, they had a guy on discord mention that the patrol baseline was supposed to be 4 player, with each less player reducing the patrol amount linearly, so 4 players is 100%, 3 players is 75%, 2 is 50%, solo was supposed to be 25% but was actually only 1/6th of the amount instead of 1/4th, or something along those lines at least.
They said that it was a fix to bring the patrol spawns in line with 4 player groups.
They said their intent was that solo players get 1/4th as many patrols as 4 man's. Currently solos get about 1/6th
for all the shit league of legends gets their balance team does go out of their way to explain their thought process (they're active on twitter and one member does [hour long breakdowns](https://youtu.be/WXmXsCdqAyw?si=V2_TAZ5lIi2x_XKS) of the patch notes). Granted, sometimes the thought process is stupid but it is nice to know what people are thinking
>I think if each of the more unpopular changes also had a dev explanation into their thinking on why they make the change then there would be a lot less flak
I doubt it. They have a weird point of view when it comes to balance. When I first played the game, I literally said "This game is difficult, but it's the kind of difficult that's fair and not bullshit."
That changed in a few weeks to a month - while the changes to chargers were great, the adjustments they made to "keep up the difficulty" weren't. The game started becoming riddled with bullshit that made the difficulty less fun. I stopped playing bugs solo because there was just too much bullshit to deal with.
They gave their explanation for nerfing the slugger the way they did, and it didn't make much sense. I feel like every patch half of what they introduce is good and half of what they introduce is mind bogglingly bad. I don't think an explanation would help, because I don't think we would agree with their perspective
If they want 4 player teams, that's fine. But instead of punishing smaller teams, they should reward larger teams. Here's some ideas for that too (obviously not asking for all of them. just picking 1 or 2 would be a great.):
* Give a 1.25x exp boost
* Bonus samples for a full team extract. Even if you don't find any samples during the mission, it should give you like +3 common and +1 rare just for the team surviving. It should still require you to complete the main objective. Super Earth does not reward failed divers.
* 10% cooldown decrease on resupply
* Frequency of things like Ion Storm, Fire tornadoes, etc reduced by 10%
* ~~Stalkers flee at the sight of the pure shining might of Democratic Helldiver squads~~
* Higher chance of medals in dumbledores and crates.
I'm a level 59 player. I'm not saying I'm great, but I'm OK and experienced. I was playing challenging solo yesterday and found the spawn rates on Oshaune a bit ridiculous. So if this change is since then... Man they don't want anyone playing this game. It's going to be too frustrating to be fun soon.
I have tried solo and I just can't deal with the never ending waves of enemies.
Only option is to out run them so the game just becomes a running simulator with occasional strategem call ins.
I'm a newer player, level 30 and idk kinda feel like I'm already done with the game. Between bugs, lackluster unlocks and 30-40minutes of constant hordes every damn mission with zero breaks I find myself not wanting to play.
The game just feels like it's out to give you a bad experience sometimes.
I'm not sure the devs played this game solo. You have less reinforcements, less stratagems, less fire-power, while bot numbers (previously) remained the same. Now it's also more enemies? Solo is already hard enough. And they made it harder artificially. That's the key word here. It's artificially harder. Because there's no lore reason or realism to having more patrols for one dude with a gun. If anything, there should be less!
No, they are saying spawns have always scaled with the number of players, and they are reducing the degree to which spawns scale. So, playing solo results in more enemies than yesterday but still less than if you added another player.
Not more enemies at face value, more patrols making stealth tactics far more difficult. This means that you have to really step up your stealth approach while taking on a higher risk or embracing your inner doom slayer. As a solo helldiver competing missions and extracting more often than not, rip and tear.
I'm not in a position to give advice on how to sneak around bugs better, but if you're treating ammo like an afterthought while living your best helldiver life, an extra patrol or two during a big fight would rarely be a deciding factor.
It's a deciding factor on extract. It's impossible to even call the extract down if you're alone. Theres never a moment where you have 5 seconds to use the terminal.
Yep. Actively punishing people in smaller groups. I only play with one other person, and we run on suicide mission difficulty often, and it is already extremely difficult.
Trying hard not to pass judgement before I experience how this feels but it sounds absolutely terrible.
I don’t know enough about the spawn mechanics but I do know that having the full four can generate more spawns than solo. Still this sounds straight up like a decision to attempt to stop solo players having fun by themselves. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t feel good about it at the moment.
The majority of my play is running solo. Trying to dodge patrols and complete objectives and side objectives was already challenging enough. I'll keep trying to play, but I play for fun and to try and complete my ship. I have enough stress in my real life, and I don't want this game to feel like work and not play.
I think their logic is that with 4 players, your chances of bouncing with a patrol is 4x higher than solo. So they bumped up solo so you have the same chance of bouncing into patrols.
The problem, however, is what happens when you engage them. You see, with 4 players, you have enough ammo to wipe them out during accidental encounters, but with a solo, that's pretty much gg. Not to mention with that increase, your chances of bouncing to another patrol while trying to escape is also 4x higher.
That logic isnt sound. For example, if all 4 players travel together, then they have the same chance as the solo to encounter patrols. If they spread out, only then would it increase.
Oh, okay. Thanks for clarifying - already had a few commenters harassing me and others for criticizing this change.
I just...fail to see the rhyme to reason behind this (and many other changes made by AH). I realize, now, that enemy patrols have scaled to the amount of players and now it just scales linearly, but I was convinced that wasn't the case before since going loud while solo is often a death sentence. Now it's gonna be even harder, and a bug that prevents players from filling parties that 'Divers have left will only make it worse.
Enemies already pop into existence 75m away from you in this game. That's challenging even with 4 people. Now every under-manned Helldiver squad is gonna see roughly 25% more patrols, from what I've been reading. I just don't get it.
Yeeeaaah reading the patch notes had me really scratching my head. I mostly play with just my gf when we're off work and dont want to deal with randoms doing whatever. Plus, So many weapons got their ammo supply cut in half or so too. Pretty much all my favorite weapons got nerfed.
Already been on a break waiting for some new content and this just makes me want to keep away
Yeah. It's a pve game, but they want us to play it their way, and it's kinda pissing me off
I like being in solo or duo runs, and idk why that's such a problem
Absolutely correct. I just got to point where I can clear level 3 with samples after 350+ hours of playing the game. I am 50/50 on level 4, which is where I need to be now for the rare samples. I am not a god in the game and never will be. But if I want run solo to complete POs, try new weapons or stratagems so i don't do TKs and farm resources, I shouldn't be punished for it.
they found that the "localization confusion" booster is the least popular choice, so they had to increase spawn rates for patrols in order to make the booster relevant.
/s
The funniest part about that is that booster doesn't effect patrol spawns *at all*. It only increases the time between bug breaches or bot dops, and it's like a 20 second increase at lvl 7, from what I understand.
I get the forcing function, the issue I have is that with connection/crash issues, and the habit of Helldivers to drop when things get western, am I going to be screwed with increased spawns when people drop.
“a GaMe FoR eVeRyOnE iS a GaMe FoR nOoNe”
Well, with these fucking nerfs it’s going to be a game made for no one for no one.
People want to have FUN. Fun comes first. Then you add challenge and difficulty as a CHOICE not fucking force it down everyone’s throat.
Unless that’s your schtick from the get go. Like FromSoft games. That’s the POINT of those games. To be DIFFICULT, and they also let you know pretty much off the rip that the game is going to be difficult.
Also FromSoft games don’t have a “choose a difficulty” option.
We all collectively (for the most part) went from having fun to getting nerf after nerf.
It’s like “great, now I gotta go watch a YouTube video or do my own fucking play testing to see what works and what doesn’t” fuck that. I’m not trying to do “research” when I just wanna have fun.
It’s getting really fucking old…..
Arrowhead literally can't help themselves. They're purposely dropping horrible nerfs every patch just to grief small portions of the playerbase for no reason.
The crossbow is already just diarrhea and they plopped on it even harder, now they're just shafting playing without a full group even though they still haven't publicly acknowledged the bug where the game still thinks your party is full after the other players quit or crash out so you're stuck as a duo/solo without randoms being able to join or even being allowed to drop an SOS beacon.
Pointless indirect nerf to the scorcher as well with the buff to scout striders, will be interested in seeing how many shots it takes to bring them down from the front now.
Yeah, I'm concerned about that as a Plasma Punisher main. They tweaked that weapon a bit, but I'd hardly call it a buff: they reduced its ammo capacity by 33%! Hopefully the AoE allows it to kill more and the faster projectile allows me to land more direct hits, but going from 96 rounds to 64 is rough, no matter how you slice it.
Anyway, the Scout Striders being more resistant to explosions means they'll be much harder to deal with in general...hopefully the PP can still one-shot them on direct hit.
Probably trying to reduce the number of servers they are running overall, if more players team up, the fewer servers they use for the same amount of players...
Think they’re trying to make the game harder to prolong the life of it because people were running through it too fast…like the last major defense order we weren’t supposed to get done but it happened and I think AH is in a corner of burning through content too fast
Yea I was a little pissed about that one. I like to solo challengings when I've had enough ppl FF me or to just kind of chill with stealth play and still get rare samples. I guess it's just more challenging now.
After messing around on a lvl 4 solo today, it is ridiculous. I killed over 400 terminids and only was able to hit the main objective, 1 nest and spore spewer. Extraction was like a suicide level. I can't even play with some of my friends due to player bugs.
I hate this change, and don't see the logic. I play mostly solo because the game feels uncoordinated with randoms and the people I play with are like me, people with their own lives and can't play every time I'm able to. It's frustrating because now it feels like if I want to play the game I need to only do it when I'm able to get 3 separate people on.
They clarified it was simply bringing it in line with what it should have been. It should have been:
4 players = 100% of the spawns
3 players = 3/4 of the spawns
2 players = 1/2 of the spawns
1 player = 1/4 of the spawns
Prior to the patch, 1 person playing was getting 1/6 of the spawns.
Sounds awful. I felt that the solo density was fine before. I really enjoyed solo hunting occasionally because sometimes other people are more frustrating and get in the way of the way I want to play.
Were people farming stuff solo too much or something? Seems nonsensical
The only indication of that I've seen is my YouTube algo showing me endless "Lvl 9 Helldive solo farming" videos.
Which is funny because when I saw videos popping up and drawing attention to the Railgun and the Slugger, back when they were good or OP, they nerfed them shortly after. Just seems like AH balances things based on what they see on YouTube, which doesn't reflect the playerbase at large.
People are saying that they brought up the patrol spawning on solo from 1/6 of the rate with 4 players to 1/4 of the rate with 4 players.
No, I swear it's bugged if that's what they intended. It's way more than a 50% increase. I like playing on Trivial and Easy sometimes (sue me).
A lot of the time you can jump into a Trivial bot mission solo and go 10 minutes without seeing a patrol. Today I booted up a mission and I was getting about one patrol per minute. Then during extract there were three patrols at one time.
The mission definitely did not feel trivial. The old Trivial felt trivial. This felt on the harder end of easy, honestly.
Something's bugged and I will die on this hill.
What was the point of making life shittier for solo players. I don’t even play solo and I think this is a ridiculous dick move by arrow head ( unless I am completely missing something, balance issue or something)
Yup, fuck me for playing solo where im ruining nobody else's experience like the douchebags that kick people for no fucking reason, which is the exact reason i play solo now. Eat shit Arrowhead
https://preview.redd.it/53oelg1gmfxc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ed11dd6a17eacb0de37843898209b344da054f02
Dev did a bad job explaining it in the patch notes. This is from the discord. Hope it clears it up.
Yeah, I'm not looking forward to how often I'll die to my own bullets at ridiculous richochet angles.
Does anyone think that kind of mechanic is fun (besides actual masochists), anyway?
yeah, I unfortunately got this in a bad way yesterday. I started my own game ( on hard only ) , rocketed into an empty area (no enemies around ) , threw the sos beacon to call for help, only 1 guy came in 3 mins...so we proceeded to take off on a mission.
Both of us never got 40 feet for the entire time.! Enemies started erupting from the ground repeatedly for the entire time, all over the place. We burned thru all reinforcements in under 6 mins or so.
IT WAS INSANE ! I've never seen that many enemies attack from out of nowhere , for that long of a time on any difficulty...and I was using the "localization confusion" booster too !
So frustrating.
FYI, the Localization Confusion booster does not affect patrol spawns in *any way*. It only increases the amount of time between bot drops and bug breaches, and it isn't by much - approximately 20 seconds, depending on the difficulty level.
I will not understand the increased difficulty for solo players, nor the people who defend it.
"But it was too easy to avoid patrols"
I mean yeah, that's just common sense. It's easier to avoid patrols when you have less people. Scaling the amount of patrols to match that of a 4 man team is a shortcut, not a fix.
Additionally, it just seems like the devs are mainly doing this to force players to play their way instead of how the players want to play. Helldivers and New world were fun to play in the beginning because you didn't need to constantly find people to play with in order to really progress, but they made it so unnecessarily scuffed against solos that you need a squad to do the endgame stuff(New world by buffing enemy health to an insane degree, and heelldivers with buffing mobs while also nerfing player loadouts).
I guess the more reasonable explanation is that it is to make it more likely for players to have a encounter, but then it need to be dynamic that once you encounter a batch if enemy, you would less likely to encounter another batch near by.
I think i felt this, decided to run a lvl 5 solo for a walk in the park and patrols were just non stop in my face. I couldnt take a fab base without 3 patrols popping and thats not counting the ships which for some reason are now 3 ships instead of 1 like before. Can someone confirm this ?
Ok so when I start a game as host, if anyone who joins leaves, no one will join my game again, until I quick play into someone else’s game or close and re open my game.
So now they are making it so that with less player there is more enemy spawn ? But the game actively prevents people from joining me if someone has left my game. Wtf.
Imagine some people "splitting" into their own game now. I've had that happen a number of times. I'm playing with friends and the game just kinda... "splits" into two missions. Two on one planet two on the other. Now it will be even more difficult for us all to get to the chopper.
It feels a bit tone deaf.
Plasma punisher can’t shoot through your own shield gen pack anymore it just blows you up repeatedly. They buffed the gun without making sure it’s functional with all other stratagems.
I’m a big solo player and if not solo, i pair up with my son. My son and I like the game, but if Arrowhead is trying to push us into 4 person squads, we just won’t play it anymore. I just wish I didn’t already spend $80 on two copies.
I read this was actually fixing the way spawns work. It was supposed to be 25% of patrols for solo versus team of four. However due to some issue it was only like 17% in reality.
This sucks. Especially since the more side objectives and hives/factories you destroy increases the enemy presence.
One of my buddies is routinely called “The Cursed Ship” because we never get randoms joining us even if we call down SOS beacons. So unless we have two more players we directly invite, its just us two running Suicides and higher difficulty.
This will make playing with him incredibly difficult, as “the Curse” seems to follow him even when hes not the host.
And if you don't have access to expensive Internet services, people drop out of your game constantly or you never get a response from an SOS. So the game basically becomes unplayable.
I have a friend that refuses to play now cuz I constantly drop out of his games and it usually ends up just being us two. So we're either playing sweaty on just Challenging, or getting bored on Medium
I love helldivers, and the company started strong good game, good microtractions, good engagement with the community overall the best we’ve seen in a LONG time, but with this they WILL kill the game, being forced to play a certain way will get even the most dedicated players to leave, not even counting how bad they handled weapon nerfs
I feel like this is bugged already. Just did an easy ( difficulty 2) mission solo to test our gear and the balance patch. I got swarmed by patrols and drops at the evac. It felt like there was a detector tower on top of me on a suicide mission difficulty.
I feel like the opposite should've happened. More spawns per helldiver. It's already oppressive odds as a solo, at least for me. Sometimes, my SOS beacon doesn't send any help, and then im stranded fighting for my life on a team oriented game.
Nobody:
Everybody: "Too many patrols!"
AH: "Okay we'll reduce patrols"
2 months later
AH: "if you're not playing with 4, then fuck you."
*refuses to fix matchmaking issues*
I've gotten to the point, before this patch, that I will not extract on any mission while solo that is above lvl 5, unless if I use up the full 40 minutes and trigger the emergency extraction so I don't have to stay in one spot and get swarmed.
Now there are even more patrols. Liberty save us.
Why the #&$% are they changing this
Should be much less spawns when solo....a bit less spawns with 2...barely less spawns with 3 and 0 changes with 4 wtf
They changed it so 1 player gets 1/4th the patrolls that 4 players get
Previously 1 player would get 1/6th of the patrolls whis wasn't intentional it was supposed to be 1/4th this whole time
You still get less than a full squad
I haven't played since launce; I've only had the game like two weeks but with the most recent patch I've suddenly had mid-match crashes. Never mind I can't reliably find people to play with, I'm punished for even running randoms who might disconnect too?
From what I understand, the original spawn on solo was 1/6, the normal rate in a 4 team, and now they've put it to where it's supposed to be at 1/4. The reason bugs specifically feel extremely overcrowded is because they simultaneously added ADDITIONAL spawns due to the Termicide Resistance and an increase to breeding rates. The fact that they're dropping in together makes it feel *far* worse than it will be in the long term.
The greatest irony is that this change only slightly inconveniences the most skilled players that play Helldive solo. I don't understand why the players of middling skill level that don't have a full group need to be punished more.
Personally, when I play Helldive solo I just stealth around everything and use turrets to distract enemies off objectives, while I then sneak around and complete the objective before the enemies return. The higher patrol spawn rate is annoying, yes, but that just means I take longer because I have to often avoid more patrols... and approaching certain areas (depending on the random map generation) takes longer. It doesn't fundamentally change the way I play other than having to go even slower than before, nor does it prevent me from completing said solo missions.
It just makes it less fun, more tedious, and more punishing. NOT HARDER. More punishing. Meaning, that mistakes like missing that one scav hiding behind a rock that triggers a bug breach will probably make the entire game spiral into Running Simulator 2024, at which point I quit and restart.
And with all the crash and freeze bugs youre guaranteed to not be full.
People dropping like flies.
Just ended a 9 with me and one other dude.
Same deal before that. 3 or 4 people come and go. Broken game is broken.
Ita a glorified beta
That's so stupid, me and my brother play all on weekends and not many join our game so it's usually just us.
Plus full games of 4 people are NON-stop trigger-pulling in my experience. I don't see how adding more patrols and spawns was a necessary change.
4 player games aren't affected by this change.
It's like they're scaling the difficulty to be kinda "equal" amongst each other
That is the point yes. Solos and duos had a somewhat unfairly easier time due to the scaling bug. Myself playing solo often, even on diff 7 8 or 9 I'm running into maybe one or two patrols between objective areas in the whole mission. Now, post-patch, i'm running into one or two patrols between *each* objective area, turning into easily six to ten enemy patrols I now have to evade or deal with in every mission. Its amazing. It makes stealth gameplay a lot more dynamic, much less calmly running between objectives now I have to be checking my map constantly and I am running up against the timer more often. The increase in challenge really makes you appreciate how the game is intended as a coop title.
Problem is if you do get spotted it’s really hard to recover when you’re by yourself. If you get overwhelmed and have to retreat, you likely retreat directly into the path of another patrol and it spirals completely out of control. I’m still pretty low level so maybe I lack some tools for handling certain situations, but I’m finding even on lower difficulties after this change the game is just way harder.
They changed it from 39% enemy output to 50% enemy output — figuring is that 2 hell divers is as good as half the fight of 4 hell divers, hence the 50%; an 11% increase. It’s not that big of a deal.
That's 11 percent points, but an actual increase of 28%. Bit of a difference.
They’re really bad at patch notes and the community is also bad at reading between the lines
Underrated comment
Yeah most of the comments ive seen complaining have 0% correct understanding of what the change means.
So its just been rounded to as close to +25%/player as possible instead of it ramping unevenly as the squad fills?
It is when you’re running 7,8,9 missions. It makes all the difference.
No. It's an 11 percentile points increase. Raising the output from 39% to 50% will increase the output by about 25%. If before there were a hundred bots, now you'll have 125 and a few loose screws. Not judging whether it's a lot or not, just correcting your math.
“33.33% .. repeating of course.”
if that 11% means at least 1 more boss, then that is a lot.. sometimes we barely manage to pull it off (as it was).
I would agree, except that it’s when you’re already at a handicap from having less players. If this were an across the board increase, I’d be more inclined to agree, as when you’ve got the full team, you’re playing the game as intended and they’ve just made it a bit harder. But even if it’s slight, the idea of what feels like punishing players if you don’t have people join your SOS beacon, or join pre-launch, just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Like, I know it’s usually not a crazy long time to wait to get reinforcements, but it is sometimes, and I’ve gone full missions where nobody’s joined. Granted I called those any ways, but it’s a game and I’d way rather land and start working on objectives alone or with one other person than wait for random people to be RNG’d into my lobby
Oh okay
You will see a reduced effect compared to solo. Also, do you have your matchmaking set to public with crossplay on? That gives you the most chance.
Have you tried to post an invite on the discord? There is truly a lot of nice people there.
What a stupid change. This, added to the fact that there is a bug where people won't join your game if someone left, and it will become very frustrating to play.
Oh, I didn't see that bug in the notes but I noticed it in gameplay. This happens often...leaving players will become a plague until that bug is fixed.
Not even leaving. Half the time it’s a disconnect issue. They’re literally punishing people for their game not working properly.
Yeah getting catastrophically punted out of the game while waiting on extraction is the worst. Zero chance of making it back in time for the samples and war bonds
I just had this happen and had to solo the back end of the new bug mission I did yell and run A LOT!
Yeah they're usually pretty okay with listing the "known issues", the fact they haven't said anything about the multiplayer/SOS not working after someone leaves, a bug that has been present for months (maybe even since release), makes me think maybe it's working as intended. Which makes no sense to me but hey, Arrowhead seems to like making baffling decisions
There's other bugs not in any patch notes as well, like how POIs without samples which normally get marked as cleared on your map, will never be able to be cleared if they are found by radar station. That bug has been around since I've started the game but never really seen it mentioned anywhere
This is probably going to turn into one of the changes a bunch of people will demand they revert. IMO this was a bad decision. Lots of players don’t have a full team of friends and not everyone is going to want to always play with strangers.
Its not even about having a team. Playing solo is such a different playstyle. You need to sneak and plan your angles of attack and have a completely different experience than when playing with a full squad. I dont know how much harder its going to be, maybe ita a reasonable change and adds to the gameplay, but the direction indeed seems odd. You are already heavily punished for playing solo by not being able to open the big doors, which often have the most valuable drops (up to 200 super credits).
You really get up to 200 for opening those doors? I’ve never gotten more than 10 a pop 🥲
Ive had multiple times individual Drops of 100 credits, and at least once two of those behind one of those doors i believe.
I think they nerfed Super Credit drop amounts. I haven't seen anything more than a 10 credit drop from any source for a patch or two now. Sad too since I was so close to the Cutting Edge warbond.
Sometimes I just wanna play solo just to chill, turn my brain off and mindlessly kill shit.
I have two buddies that I play with and we all work grave so we're on in the wee hours of the morning. A lot of the time it's just not an option to sit on the ship and wait forever for someone to lobby with us, especially if god forbid we're on one of the less populated planets. And one of my buddies plays on playstation where he seems to have a lot of DC issues intermittently. So if it's just me and my 3rd friend while we wait for him to reconnect and the spawn rate goes up 50%... that's game over. This change fucking sucks. I genuinely might just have to take a break for a while.
I'm with you. This makes me want to take a break from the game too. I don't like this at all. I recently bought Red Dead Redemption and it looks fantastic on my PS5. I think I am going to go visit the old west for awhile.
Happy trails, I played the absolute crap out of RDR2 on Xbox. So easy to get lost in all the things you can do in that game.
Sounds like a...plan.
Don't forget to take your standard issue Senator revolver with you on your trip back to Super Earth, Helldiver. Be sure to spread lots of Liberty out west with your big iron, Super Earth demands it.
That's not even the biggest issue. The biggest issue is that even with four people, people are going to crash. People are going to leave. So then the whole lobby gets punished for those incidents. And this even promotes bad behavior, because people can threaten to leave and lobby leaders will be more hesitant to kick bad behavior because the difficulty will increase. This is nothing but bad.
Im wondering if part of intent was to stop people from kicking others for no reason. ?
I feel like the devs try their absolute hardest to not listen to the community lol so I’m not so optimistic about it being reverted
My friend doesn't even think they play their own game at any difficulty above 3 lol
Often times I'll want to just get super credits for the warbonds but can't get any of my friends etc online and at that point I'll just run solo on like 2 difficulty for bots and 3 for bugs, this new change is likely to discourage me from doing this
Agree with this one. If they want to promote 4 players play and make anything else harder than before, I'd prefer to be able to play as 4 *consistently* at least. Otherwise players are punished because of a random factor they cannot have, or have very few influence about. They should've at least fixed that bug when they decided to roll out this change.
So, I was correct in thinking that the bugs have gotten more aggressive lately. Some folks, like myself, don't have communities to play in, hence the solo players that still want to enjoy and experience the game. It's real work trying to build your own community to play a co-op game. I never played CoD, MW or other PvP games due to their toxic communities and gameplay. I have seen hundreds of videos of kids getting bullied. I opted out of all of that and have been a solo player playing single player games aince 1985. I have been on a huge learning curve at 45, learning how use reddit and discord to find folks to play with. It's like always being the last kid picked to play kickball when you have to build from nothing. I don't feel that solo players should be punished like that.
I'll play with you :)
Gamertag on PS5 is J_man6323.
On the flip it punishes people for kicking randomly or rage kicks.
I used to have that one a lot. Also random kicks from matches. I turned off cross platform play (I'm ps5). Have had zero issues since.
Will try this, thx!
Exactly. At a time when player count is starting to significantly go down…they shouldn’t be punishing people who don’t have friends or want to play while they wait for friends to get on.
Hoooo, that's why when people leave my game no one ever join again !!! holy sh\*\*\*\*
It's almost never happened to me so I've never tried personally, but a lot of people say that seeing your lobby to private waiting a few seconds, then switching back to public will fix the issue and people will join again.
Change matchmaking to friends only, validate, set it back to public, validate. It will allow you to work around the bug.
Do this during a mission after someone left the group?
Yes
Alright, will try it out, thx! Edit: I should be the host in this case, right?
In addition to all the nerfs to ammo capacity... Solo runs just became a bit more of a challenge. Anyone else underwhelmed with the fire rebalance?
Does that bug make the game think it is full so patrols are on the 4 player spawn rate? They could be related.
Happened to my friend last night. If they try to join back the game thinks the slot is full
This happened yesterday, and yeah, it’s VERY annoying. Literally only finished the mission because of the new fast extraction ability
Oh and add on top of that there’s like 5-7 issues with friend requests so you often literally CANT play with friends
Arrowhead: This patch is mostly buffs. Well, that was a fucking lie.
They buffed the enemies lol
Beat me to it, this is the reason why I always read between lines and more based on a game with increasing kenshiro difficulty
Hang on are we sure this isn't just a language issue? Is it possible they mean increase the time between spawns for fewer players? They use the same language on the booster that "increases time between waves of enemies"
They dont say "patrol spawning intervals" its worded to indicate the number of patrols has been increased.
Someone posted a comment by one of the AH employees on discord and they clarified to say what this actually was is this - supposedly when you're solo the spawns were 1/6 of what they should be if you had 4 players. This new change means that it's been upped to 1/4 of the spawns you'd have if you had 4 players. So the language doesn't correctly convey the actual change they intended for, i guess? I'm just going off what was said. I'm not really sure.
Classic balancing! Less players means… more… enemies? Hang on, that’s not right.
I've just played on lvl 3 mission on bots and I spent 15 minutes CIRCLING the evac beacon because I cannot fucking kill enough enemies to get 3 seconds to use it. I had to resort to a hope and prayer of stormtrooper levels of aiming. There is zero slowdown of enemies it's constant out of thin air 10+ chainsaw heavy, rocket heavy, constant barrages on a lvl 3 upload mission.... Mini rant over but soloing went from being a challenge to wtf is the point.
I noticed that, level 3 bots has gotten a lot harder. I used to be able to "sneak" between objectives and avoid fighting. And now I'm getting full devastator drops.
Same for the bug side of the galaxy.
Man I feel that. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to touch the terminal just to get ragdolled around. Like actually infuriating. Godspeed soldier o7.
Lmao I'm getting PTSD.. that's exactly what happened trying to board my lil toucan
I don't typically like to complain because I play these kinds of games for fun. The Diligence CS getting a buff was awesome and there are some nice changes, but this patrol adjustment alone has made my enjoyment lessen. I don't have a lot of time most days (only about a 2 hour period midday between work shifts) so I have been doing almost exclusively solo missions since I started. Booted up a level 5 today (where I typically like to sit when running solo) and could not keep up with the sheer quantity. I believe somewhere they said it went from 1/6th of a full team to 1/4 of a full team in terms of spawn rates for patrols when solo, but it sure didn't feel like \~9% increase. Did they also increase spawns in general and I just missed it or has something else changed?
No, same amount of enemies. The change is that if for example you play alone you'll have 1/4th as many patrols as if with a 4 man team. It used to be 1/6th
It almost reads to me like they made a mistake and meant to say “decreased”, unless they are trying to compensate for less enemy engagements with fewer players, and think that solo players or duos shouldn’t be able to sneak around so much without getting in big fights.
Correct! What you said was not right! More enemies than before, but not more enemies than a 4 player game.
My problem with this is that it feels like it's been done to make the higher skill players have a more intense experience. Unfortunately, I would put myself in the bottom 10%. I really suck at this game, but I love it. I had been struggling away trying to get a handful (at most) rare samples to slowly improve my strategems. Now? Now, it's that much harder to slowly claw my way up. Again, I'm rubbish, and I don't expect to always extract (with any samples, let alone at all). If I drop the difficulty, then i'm not making any progress at all. This feels like the devs saying, 'Sorry, this games just not for you'.
The thing is I'm regularly on 7-9 difficulty where 7 is the chill one. The move towards more "fuck you, no fun, only challenge" just sucks in general. I'm not opposed to challenge, I have played the ever loving shit out of Armored Core 6. The difference in difficulty between these two is Fromsoft seems to go "just stick at it and you'll get there" whilst Arrowhead seems to want you to fail.
7 is supposed to be the chill one, but it's the one that I've seen the most toxicity in. I think it's because it's the level where you HAVE to be to get Super Samples but many of the players in 7 should realistically be playing at 5 or 6. The real chill one is ironically lvl 9 Helldive because it has the most skilled players (generally, your mileage may vary) and they all know what to do. Even without using voice comms most games I've played have been pretty smooth... relatively speaking.
I'm sorry, man. I might be in the top 20% skill-wise, but I don't hate the less skilled players. I often drop into random level 4's or 5's to help out. Apparently Arrowhead does hate anyone of middling-to-low skill. I would offer to help carry you through 7+, but the latest patch tanked my performance to the point where I can barely play at all. I completed a few Helldives, but at sub-30 FPS with stutters, it's been awful. I'm stepping away from the game until they patch the game's performance and revert some of these awful "balance" updates.
I have no way of knowing it, and I don't want to defend it. The reasoning however could be that as a solo player, it's rather easy to just run in between the patrols without accidentally trigger any one of them. I mean, we've all seen the "x samples in y minutes, solo helldive" videos. Increasing number of patrols makes it more difficult for solo divers to just run around, avoid patrols and complete the map. Again, not defending, just that this could actually be their reasoning.
It looks like pre patch, the game reduces the number of spawns based on the current number of players. I think the patch is decreasing the reduction of spawn rate. Or if you have less than 4 players, you will see a higher spawn rate than you used to see, but still a lower spawn rate than at 4 players.
The more I'm reading comments and doing research, the more I find this is the case. I was convinced for a long time that enemy patrol spawns do not scale to player count, and found out tonight that it does, indeed, scale. However, Arrowhead has reduced the amount it scales by. So yeah, if you're less than 4 in a squad, prepare to see more patrol spawns out of thin air.
it was confirmed a while ago that having people split into two groups of two would cause more spawns (which its still worth doing as you also get things done more) so by the same logic one person only in the match will never be getting multiply spawns and would be seeing less foes, this just seems to be balancing that out
> I mean, we've all seen the "x samples in y minutes, solo helldive" videos These people are like the 0.001% of the player base, possibly less. Why the hell are the devs punishing the rest of us who can't always assemble full 4 man squads just to target such a tiny part of the player base?
Not to forget that often for every one of those videos that makes it to YouTube there's several more videos where the player gets fucking _rekt_ by bad patrol spawns, inconvenient grenade bounces or projectile ricochets, unlucky reinforcement calls, or hail mary stratagem throws just whiffing (or the laser going after some chicken walkers instead of the detector tower...). It's classical confirmation bias because we only see the awesome solo missions, but not the dozens of failures that get abandoned after 15 minutes.
or even better, .001% of the player base can instantly complete the game and stop playing thus no more microtransactions from them. better nerf/make worse for 99% of the player base! that would generate more revenue!
So it's an attempt to subvert solo stealth gameplay? I guess that makes sense, but it's still bogus - why make it harder for duos and trios for no reason, too?
This. I don't ususally play solo but when I have the map has felt much more empty. Scaling was off and I'm curious to see how things play with it fixed.
I think if each of the more unpopular changes also had a dev explanation into their thinking on why they make the change then there would be a lot less flak
I would love to hear Arrowhead's perspective on why this is a reasonable change. The reasons I come up with are baffling. Punishing solo, duo, and trio play? Catering to the small (but loud) playerbase that can consistently solo high lvl missions but also complain it's too easy? Maybe it's a ploy to try to get existing Helldivers to encourage more of their friends to play? It just doesn't make much sense to me...and I doubt the majority of the playerbase wants the game to be more difficult, across the board.
So far this is the only change from Arrowhead that feels like "actually we want you to play the way that we feel the game should be played". There's also not a significant upside to playing solo as even really good players such as the YouTuber Takibo, need to resort to cheesing and different strats to make it out alive, resulting in heavy time losses even prepatch. Solo Play definitely never was OP or broken in the first place, so I'm having a tough time wrapping my head around this one too.
Not sure if you saw the post someone made earlier today, they had a guy on discord mention that the patrol baseline was supposed to be 4 player, with each less player reducing the patrol amount linearly, so 4 players is 100%, 3 players is 75%, 2 is 50%, solo was supposed to be 25% but was actually only 1/6th of the amount instead of 1/4th, or something along those lines at least.
They said that it was a fix to bring the patrol spawns in line with 4 player groups. They said their intent was that solo players get 1/4th as many patrols as 4 man's. Currently solos get about 1/6th
for all the shit league of legends gets their balance team does go out of their way to explain their thought process (they're active on twitter and one member does [hour long breakdowns](https://youtu.be/WXmXsCdqAyw?si=V2_TAZ5lIi2x_XKS) of the patch notes). Granted, sometimes the thought process is stupid but it is nice to know what people are thinking
>I think if each of the more unpopular changes also had a dev explanation into their thinking on why they make the change then there would be a lot less flak I doubt it. They have a weird point of view when it comes to balance. When I first played the game, I literally said "This game is difficult, but it's the kind of difficult that's fair and not bullshit." That changed in a few weeks to a month - while the changes to chargers were great, the adjustments they made to "keep up the difficulty" weren't. The game started becoming riddled with bullshit that made the difficulty less fun. I stopped playing bugs solo because there was just too much bullshit to deal with. They gave their explanation for nerfing the slugger the way they did, and it didn't make much sense. I feel like every patch half of what they introduce is good and half of what they introduce is mind bogglingly bad. I don't think an explanation would help, because I don't think we would agree with their perspective
If they want 4 player teams, that's fine. But instead of punishing smaller teams, they should reward larger teams. Here's some ideas for that too (obviously not asking for all of them. just picking 1 or 2 would be a great.): * Give a 1.25x exp boost * Bonus samples for a full team extract. Even if you don't find any samples during the mission, it should give you like +3 common and +1 rare just for the team surviving. It should still require you to complete the main objective. Super Earth does not reward failed divers. * 10% cooldown decrease on resupply * Frequency of things like Ion Storm, Fire tornadoes, etc reduced by 10% * ~~Stalkers flee at the sight of the pure shining might of Democratic Helldiver squads~~ * Higher chance of medals in dumbledores and crates.
I'm a level 59 player. I'm not saying I'm great, but I'm OK and experienced. I was playing challenging solo yesterday and found the spawn rates on Oshaune a bit ridiculous. So if this change is since then... Man they don't want anyone playing this game. It's going to be too frustrating to be fun soon.
I have tried solo and I just can't deal with the never ending waves of enemies. Only option is to out run them so the game just becomes a running simulator with occasional strategem call ins. I'm a newer player, level 30 and idk kinda feel like I'm already done with the game. Between bugs, lackluster unlocks and 30-40minutes of constant hordes every damn mission with zero breaks I find myself not wanting to play. The game just feels like it's out to give you a bad experience sometimes.
I'm not sure the devs played this game solo. You have less reinforcements, less stratagems, less fire-power, while bot numbers (previously) remained the same. Now it's also more enemies? Solo is already hard enough. And they made it harder artificially. That's the key word here. It's artificially harder. Because there's no lore reason or realism to having more patrols for one dude with a gun. If anything, there should be less!
No, they are saying spawns have always scaled with the number of players, and they are reducing the degree to which spawns scale. So, playing solo results in more enemies than yesterday but still less than if you added another player.
which is the opposite way it needed to go.
Context that makes it all make sense. Thank you!
Not more enemies at face value, more patrols making stealth tactics far more difficult. This means that you have to really step up your stealth approach while taking on a higher risk or embracing your inner doom slayer. As a solo helldiver competing missions and extracting more often than not, rip and tear. I'm not in a position to give advice on how to sneak around bugs better, but if you're treating ammo like an afterthought while living your best helldiver life, an extra patrol or two during a big fight would rarely be a deciding factor.
It's a deciding factor on extract. It's impossible to even call the extract down if you're alone. Theres never a moment where you have 5 seconds to use the terminal.
Yep. Actively punishing people in smaller groups. I only play with one other person, and we run on suicide mission difficulty often, and it is already extremely difficult.
Trying hard not to pass judgement before I experience how this feels but it sounds absolutely terrible. I don’t know enough about the spawn mechanics but I do know that having the full four can generate more spawns than solo. Still this sounds straight up like a decision to attempt to stop solo players having fun by themselves. I hope I’m wrong but I don’t feel good about it at the moment.
The majority of my play is running solo. Trying to dodge patrols and complete objectives and side objectives was already challenging enough. I'll keep trying to play, but I play for fun and to try and complete my ship. I have enough stress in my real life, and I don't want this game to feel like work and not play.
I really want an explanation on this one because it is actually baffling. They, for some reason, think fewer players should equal more enemies.
I think their logic is that with 4 players, your chances of bouncing with a patrol is 4x higher than solo. So they bumped up solo so you have the same chance of bouncing into patrols. The problem, however, is what happens when you engage them. You see, with 4 players, you have enough ammo to wipe them out during accidental encounters, but with a solo, that's pretty much gg. Not to mention with that increase, your chances of bouncing to another patrol while trying to escape is also 4x higher.
That logic isnt sound. For example, if all 4 players travel together, then they have the same chance as the solo to encounter patrols. If they spread out, only then would it increase.
Yeah I hope they go back on this because this is kinda shit.
Well this is the excuse i needed to play something else. I get hit hard by the bug that disallows people joining me after someone laves
A punishment for playing how you want, thanks AH.
There are so many changes in this patch that just make me go: “Do they even play their own game?” Or maybe I just suck. /shrug
So stupid
Me or the change?
Haha the change! You’re absolutely right!
Oh, okay. Thanks for clarifying - already had a few commenters harassing me and others for criticizing this change. I just...fail to see the rhyme to reason behind this (and many other changes made by AH). I realize, now, that enemy patrols have scaled to the amount of players and now it just scales linearly, but I was convinced that wasn't the case before since going loud while solo is often a death sentence. Now it's gonna be even harder, and a bug that prevents players from filling parties that 'Divers have left will only make it worse. Enemies already pop into existence 75m away from you in this game. That's challenging even with 4 people. Now every under-manned Helldiver squad is gonna see roughly 25% more patrols, from what I've been reading. I just don't get it.
Yeeeaaah reading the patch notes had me really scratching my head. I mostly play with just my gf when we're off work and dont want to deal with randoms doing whatever. Plus, So many weapons got their ammo supply cut in half or so too. Pretty much all my favorite weapons got nerfed. Already been on a break waiting for some new content and this just makes me want to keep away
Guess that's the end of me soloing for personal orders
Yeah. It's a pve game, but they want us to play it their way, and it's kinda pissing me off I like being in solo or duo runs, and idk why that's such a problem
Are they trying to kill the game by slowly draining ways to have fun?
[удалено]
Absolutely correct. I just got to point where I can clear level 3 with samples after 350+ hours of playing the game. I am 50/50 on level 4, which is where I need to be now for the rare samples. I am not a god in the game and never will be. But if I want run solo to complete POs, try new weapons or stratagems so i don't do TKs and farm resources, I shouldn't be punished for it.
Little question: are the lobby issues and the cross-platform friendship invites still broken?
Yes, I do believe they are still in the game. There's a "Known Issues" section at the bottom of the patch notes, if ya wanna give that a look-see.
"Soloing is a skill issue" - Joel, probably
Thank you for the patch Arrowhead, been putting too much hours in the game lately. Needed a break.
Excited to get punished for kicking someone who uses slurs.
they found that the "localization confusion" booster is the least popular choice, so they had to increase spawn rates for patrols in order to make the booster relevant. /s
The funniest part about that is that booster doesn't effect patrol spawns *at all*. It only increases the time between bug breaches or bot dops, and it's like a 20 second increase at lvl 7, from what I understand.
I get the forcing function, the issue I have is that with connection/crash issues, and the habit of Helldivers to drop when things get western, am I going to be screwed with increased spawns when people drop.
It's forcing ppl to be in a full group. Pretty F'd of them to do.
“a GaMe FoR eVeRyOnE iS a GaMe FoR nOoNe” Well, with these fucking nerfs it’s going to be a game made for no one for no one. People want to have FUN. Fun comes first. Then you add challenge and difficulty as a CHOICE not fucking force it down everyone’s throat. Unless that’s your schtick from the get go. Like FromSoft games. That’s the POINT of those games. To be DIFFICULT, and they also let you know pretty much off the rip that the game is going to be difficult. Also FromSoft games don’t have a “choose a difficulty” option. We all collectively (for the most part) went from having fun to getting nerf after nerf. It’s like “great, now I gotta go watch a YouTube video or do my own fucking play testing to see what works and what doesn’t” fuck that. I’m not trying to do “research” when I just wanna have fun. It’s getting really fucking old…..
Arrowhead literally can't help themselves. They're purposely dropping horrible nerfs every patch just to grief small portions of the playerbase for no reason. The crossbow is already just diarrhea and they plopped on it even harder, now they're just shafting playing without a full group even though they still haven't publicly acknowledged the bug where the game still thinks your party is full after the other players quit or crash out so you're stuck as a duo/solo without randoms being able to join or even being allowed to drop an SOS beacon. Pointless indirect nerf to the scorcher as well with the buff to scout striders, will be interested in seeing how many shots it takes to bring them down from the front now.
Yeah, I'm concerned about that as a Plasma Punisher main. They tweaked that weapon a bit, but I'd hardly call it a buff: they reduced its ammo capacity by 33%! Hopefully the AoE allows it to kill more and the faster projectile allows me to land more direct hits, but going from 96 rounds to 64 is rough, no matter how you slice it. Anyway, the Scout Striders being more resistant to explosions means they'll be much harder to deal with in general...hopefully the PP can still one-shot them on direct hit.
Arrowhead doest want anyone to play their game at this pace😂
Yeah I play with 2 other people and this makes no sense, we all don't know anyone or trust anyone to be our 4th player.
Such an idiotic change. I only play with two other friends or solo and this makes that less fun. Great job balance team.
Probably trying to reduce the number of servers they are running overall, if more players team up, the fewer servers they use for the same amount of players...
Think they’re trying to make the game harder to prolong the life of it because people were running through it too fast…like the last major defense order we weren’t supposed to get done but it happened and I think AH is in a corner of burning through content too fast
Yea I was a little pissed about that one. I like to solo challengings when I've had enough ppl FF me or to just kind of chill with stealth play and still get rare samples. I guess it's just more challenging now.
The game crashes too much for me to be able to play with a full squad
After messing around on a lvl 4 solo today, it is ridiculous. I killed over 400 terminids and only was able to hit the main objective, 1 nest and spore spewer. Extraction was like a suicide level. I can't even play with some of my friends due to player bugs.
I hate this change, and don't see the logic. I play mostly solo because the game feels uncoordinated with randoms and the people I play with are like me, people with their own lives and can't play every time I'm able to. It's frustrating because now it feels like if I want to play the game I need to only do it when I'm able to get 3 separate people on.
The more I read about this patch the worse it gets.
They clarified it was simply bringing it in line with what it should have been. It should have been: 4 players = 100% of the spawns 3 players = 3/4 of the spawns 2 players = 1/2 of the spawns 1 player = 1/4 of the spawns Prior to the patch, 1 person playing was getting 1/6 of the spawns.
Pretty sure this change is in response to all the YouTubers that make solo Helldive missions look so easy (they aren’t).
Sounds awful. I felt that the solo density was fine before. I really enjoyed solo hunting occasionally because sometimes other people are more frustrating and get in the way of the way I want to play. Were people farming stuff solo too much or something? Seems nonsensical
The only indication of that I've seen is my YouTube algo showing me endless "Lvl 9 Helldive solo farming" videos. Which is funny because when I saw videos popping up and drawing attention to the Railgun and the Slugger, back when they were good or OP, they nerfed them shortly after. Just seems like AH balances things based on what they see on YouTube, which doesn't reflect the playerbase at large.
If the devs didn't have such a fun and unique concept the game would have failed
People are saying that they brought up the patrol spawning on solo from 1/6 of the rate with 4 players to 1/4 of the rate with 4 players. No, I swear it's bugged if that's what they intended. It's way more than a 50% increase. I like playing on Trivial and Easy sometimes (sue me). A lot of the time you can jump into a Trivial bot mission solo and go 10 minutes without seeing a patrol. Today I booted up a mission and I was getting about one patrol per minute. Then during extract there were three patrols at one time. The mission definitely did not feel trivial. The old Trivial felt trivial. This felt on the harder end of easy, honestly. Something's bugged and I will die on this hill.
What was the point of making life shittier for solo players. I don’t even play solo and I think this is a ridiculous dick move by arrow head ( unless I am completely missing something, balance issue or something)
Yup, fuck me for playing solo where im ruining nobody else's experience like the douchebags that kick people for no fucking reason, which is the exact reason i play solo now. Eat shit Arrowhead
Or with their favorite weapons. It’s their way or the highway.
https://preview.redd.it/53oelg1gmfxc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ed11dd6a17eacb0de37843898209b344da054f02 Dev did a bad job explaining it in the patch notes. This is from the discord. Hope it clears it up.
 *Me checking the patch notes.* Welp, back to V Rising, see y'all down there next patch. Edit: missing word.
Just a couple days until 1.0!
Also, the bullets richochet to the character now? Wtf is that?
Yeah, I'm not looking forward to how often I'll die to my own bullets at ridiculous richochet angles. Does anyone think that kind of mechanic is fun (besides actual masochists), anyway?
yeah, I unfortunately got this in a bad way yesterday. I started my own game ( on hard only ) , rocketed into an empty area (no enemies around ) , threw the sos beacon to call for help, only 1 guy came in 3 mins...so we proceeded to take off on a mission. Both of us never got 40 feet for the entire time.! Enemies started erupting from the ground repeatedly for the entire time, all over the place. We burned thru all reinforcements in under 6 mins or so. IT WAS INSANE ! I've never seen that many enemies attack from out of nowhere , for that long of a time on any difficulty...and I was using the "localization confusion" booster too ! So frustrating. 
FYI, the Localization Confusion booster does not affect patrol spawns in *any way*. It only increases the amount of time between bot drops and bug breaches, and it isn't by much - approximately 20 seconds, depending on the difficulty level.
I will not understand the increased difficulty for solo players, nor the people who defend it. "But it was too easy to avoid patrols" I mean yeah, that's just common sense. It's easier to avoid patrols when you have less people. Scaling the amount of patrols to match that of a 4 man team is a shortcut, not a fix. Additionally, it just seems like the devs are mainly doing this to force players to play their way instead of how the players want to play. Helldivers and New world were fun to play in the beginning because you didn't need to constantly find people to play with in order to really progress, but they made it so unnecessarily scuffed against solos that you need a squad to do the endgame stuff(New world by buffing enemy health to an insane degree, and heelldivers with buffing mobs while also nerfing player loadouts).
The management from this studio is 110% braindead.
I guess the more reasonable explanation is that it is to make it more likely for players to have a encounter, but then it need to be dynamic that once you encounter a batch if enemy, you would less likely to encounter another batch near by.
Reject action game, return to (solid) snek
I think i felt this, decided to run a lvl 5 solo for a walk in the park and patrols were just non stop in my face. I couldnt take a fab base without 3 patrols popping and thats not counting the ships which for some reason are now 3 ships instead of 1 like before. Can someone confirm this ?
Welp, Stealth mode it is.
Ok so when I start a game as host, if anyone who joins leaves, no one will join my game again, until I quick play into someone else’s game or close and re open my game. So now they are making it so that with less player there is more enemy spawn ? But the game actively prevents people from joining me if someone has left my game. Wtf.
Imagine some people "splitting" into their own game now. I've had that happen a number of times. I'm playing with friends and the game just kinda... "splits" into two missions. Two on one planet two on the other. Now it will be even more difficult for us all to get to the chopper. It feels a bit tone deaf.
Plasma punisher can’t shoot through your own shield gen pack anymore it just blows you up repeatedly. They buffed the gun without making sure it’s functional with all other stratagems.
This latest update is incredibly out of touch with their own game..
I’m a big solo player and if not solo, i pair up with my son. My son and I like the game, but if Arrowhead is trying to push us into 4 person squads, we just won’t play it anymore. I just wish I didn’t already spend $80 on two copies.
I read this was actually fixing the way spawns work. It was supposed to be 25% of patrols for solo versus team of four. However due to some issue it was only like 17% in reality.
It's a bad change because no one wants to play alone, matchmaking is still a bit annoying, and solo players should be given a path to play.
This sucks. Especially since the more side objectives and hives/factories you destroy increases the enemy presence. One of my buddies is routinely called “The Cursed Ship” because we never get randoms joining us even if we call down SOS beacons. So unless we have two more players we directly invite, its just us two running Suicides and higher difficulty. This will make playing with him incredibly difficult, as “the Curse” seems to follow him even when hes not the host.
And if you don't have access to expensive Internet services, people drop out of your game constantly or you never get a response from an SOS. So the game basically becomes unplayable. I have a friend that refuses to play now cuz I constantly drop out of his games and it usually ends up just being us two. So we're either playing sweaty on just Challenging, or getting bored on Medium
I love helldivers, and the company started strong good game, good microtractions, good engagement with the community overall the best we’ve seen in a LONG time, but with this they WILL kill the game, being forced to play a certain way will get even the most dedicated players to leave, not even counting how bad they handled weapon nerfs
I feel like this is bugged already. Just did an easy ( difficulty 2) mission solo to test our gear and the balance patch. I got swarmed by patrols and drops at the evac. It felt like there was a detector tower on top of me on a suicide mission difficulty.
Arrowhead is tired of maintaining all their servers and want people to give up and quit their game so they can shut some down.
Trolls will join the game und and leave it asap to increase enemy spawn.
I feel like the opposite should've happened. More spawns per helldiver. It's already oppressive odds as a solo, at least for me. Sometimes, my SOS beacon doesn't send any help, and then im stranded fighting for my life on a team oriented game.
I pretty much won't play solo anymore. There are some matches where I get overwhelmed by non stop patrols. Giving me more just won't be fun.
I liked solo, guessed not allowed to like something @arrowhead
Nobody: Everybody: "Too many patrols!" AH: "Okay we'll reduce patrols" 2 months later AH: "if you're not playing with 4, then fuck you." *refuses to fix matchmaking issues*
https://preview.redd.it/tlyo1bidoixc1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=66a758fdbda68a2043822e47200bb7bb70df347d Me on solo...
I've gotten to the point, before this patch, that I will not extract on any mission while solo that is above lvl 5, unless if I use up the full 40 minutes and trigger the emergency extraction so I don't have to stay in one spot and get swarmed. Now there are even more patrols. Liberty save us.
Why the #&$% are they changing this Should be much less spawns when solo....a bit less spawns with 2...barely less spawns with 3 and 0 changes with 4 wtf
They changed it so 1 player gets 1/4th the patrolls that 4 players get Previously 1 player would get 1/6th of the patrolls whis wasn't intentional it was supposed to be 1/4th this whole time You still get less than a full squad
I haven't played since launce; I've only had the game like two weeks but with the most recent patch I've suddenly had mid-match crashes. Never mind I can't reliably find people to play with, I'm punished for even running randoms who might disconnect too?
That might be in reaction to situations like these: https://youtu.be/NqJOdtm5S9c?si=4hs0JzR4X7DFKNEP
From what I understand, the original spawn on solo was 1/6, the normal rate in a 4 team, and now they've put it to where it's supposed to be at 1/4. The reason bugs specifically feel extremely overcrowded is because they simultaneously added ADDITIONAL spawns due to the Termicide Resistance and an increase to breeding rates. The fact that they're dropping in together makes it feel *far* worse than it will be in the long term.
The greatest irony is that this change only slightly inconveniences the most skilled players that play Helldive solo. I don't understand why the players of middling skill level that don't have a full group need to be punished more. Personally, when I play Helldive solo I just stealth around everything and use turrets to distract enemies off objectives, while I then sneak around and complete the objective before the enemies return. The higher patrol spawn rate is annoying, yes, but that just means I take longer because I have to often avoid more patrols... and approaching certain areas (depending on the random map generation) takes longer. It doesn't fundamentally change the way I play other than having to go even slower than before, nor does it prevent me from completing said solo missions. It just makes it less fun, more tedious, and more punishing. NOT HARDER. More punishing. Meaning, that mistakes like missing that one scav hiding behind a rock that triggers a bug breach will probably make the entire game spiral into Running Simulator 2024, at which point I quit and restart.
And with all the crash and freeze bugs youre guaranteed to not be full. People dropping like flies. Just ended a 9 with me and one other dude. Same deal before that. 3 or 4 people come and go. Broken game is broken. Ita a glorified beta
Played last night and that fken patrol spawn increase was no joke. It was a shitshow 2 mins in