Helldivers2 has a respectable contingent of lone wolves, despite being co-op archers. It's for a variety of reasons — including (but not limited to) becoming more fond of the unique experience of it. As of Patch 1.000.300, however, Solo Missions have become a whole lot harder, likely not the way their developers intended them.

After the change, players reported a sharp rise in patrols that made solo play impossible, and Arrowhead Games responded that "The intent of the patch is that one player had 1/4 of the patrol compared to four players but had 1/6."

This makes sense on paper. But in testing, Helldivers2 players found that this design statement was not tracked at all. A solo player has roughly the same amount of patrol spawn as a full team, unless that team is operating in a very specific situation.

As discovered by sleuth and all-around patrol expert Luchs, part of the team that built an excellent Reddit thread on this theme a few months ago, solo players were overly shafted

Before the patch, the size of your team determined how often patrols spawn. In Difficulty 4 bot matches, one player will receive a patrol every quarter. Two players will receive a patrol every three and a half minutes and so on. For a team of 4 people, this timer was sharpened to 2 minutes, 45 seconds.  

As discovered by Luchs and his Super Earth R&D team, this new 2:45 figure is now the same across the board.

There are 2 options that Luchs has put forward as to why this is the case. The first thing - it's just sniffing. busted broken. I love helldivers2to death, but this isn't the first time Arrowhead Games has enacted a major troubled change outside the gates.

The 2nd option is Luchs & Co. Previously discovered, Helldivers2's patrol spawning code works with what they call a "player group" system. "If 4 players were more than 75 meters away from the other players, the spawn rate was essentially 4 times higher because every group of players spawn their own patrol."

As Luchs has outlined, Arrowhead Games is operating on the assumption that it is a baseline for a full team patrol rate because it is possible to have four separate player groups in the game. Solo players technically have 1/4 of the patrol spawn, but only compared to a group of 4 players that are completely divided into each other. 

I badly want it not to be. Helldivers2 has absolutely the right thing to do well to break up from your team, but most of the time, you're better off sticking together. 

At the very least, Arrowhead games dealing with patrol spawn timers feel like blunders, whether intentional or not. Arrowhead itself has an internal review of how it handles the balance in the pipeline, but no one knows when this will be addressed until then, solo play will be a special hell.