Helldivers 2 devs explain why solo missions have more patrols, now: 'the intention is that one player has 1/4th of the patrols … they had 1/6th'

Helldivers 2 just had a major balance patch—and, naturally, there's already an entire orbital payload of doom and gloom smattered in with the constructive criticism and feedback. One particular upset has reared its head today: solo missions are considerably harder now.

As the patch notes themselves read: «Patrol spawning has been increased when there are fewer than four players. The fewer the players the bigger the change. For four player missions there will be no change compared to before. The biggest noticeable change will be for solo players at higher difficulties.»

Cue a flurry of activity, both on the game's subreddit and Discord. «Increasing patrol spawns for smaller squads is a d*ck move», declares a post that's gathered a respectable 1,000+ upvotes in the span of four hours. Meanwhile, a flurry of activity in the Discord had community managers moving to dig up an official response. 

«Hi! I'll try to get a proper dev reply/comment on this,» writes community manager Twinbeard, «but I think the reasoning was that playing solo on higher difficulties under some circumstances was actually easier than playing in squads sometimes, which could explain a small increase in patrols on solo. I'll check and try to get back on that!»

A short while later, community manager Spitz was able to share comments from Arrowhead's worlds team: «We unintendedly had non-linear scaling of the patrol spawns so they didn't spawn as often as they should have when less than four players—the intention is that one player has 1/4th of the patrols compared to four players, but it used to be that they had 1/6th.»

Essentially, the idea is to not make solo play harder, but to bring it up to parity. Contrary to what one might think, while solo play is definitely different, it's still very viable. It just turns the game from a 'get some!' shooter into more of a stealth game. One glimpse at the most popular guides on Steam shows several how-tos to farm higher-difficulty missions as a lone commando.