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The spawn rate of enemies in solo endless content feels like a punishment


Autongnosis
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Hello, i would like to talk about an ongoing problem that has been bugging me for a long time now.

I find myself time and again playing long missions, particularly excavations survivals, solo. I just like the atmosphere and the silence of it all, i take my time and can play how i feel like (IE: not bashing my head on a wall cause i have a sniper rifle in a team of Embers/Simulor Mirages etc). And i like to go far, hours/1000s of cryo in if i can.

The problem lies in the fact that, every time i do that, at some point i absolutely have to stop. Not because i have problems killing my enemies or because they are hitting way too hard. That'd be fine. No, my problem is that being solo makes the spawn an unimpressive trickle that is extremely boring to fight and also has absolutely no chances of sustaining the air consumption or giving me more than 2 power cells every 5 minutes (not joking - had a run in an excav where the first two extractors lasted almost 15 mins each).

Case in point, yesterday i went 2hrs in an Orokin Derelict Survival with a melee-focused Resonance Banshee. My killspeed didn't change in the slightest from minute zero to hour 2 - i was basically one-hit KOing most of what i hit either way. The problem was when in two of the biggest tiles of the OD, namely the one with three different floor levels, sewers underneath and a tree in the middle and the circular one with two levels and another tree in the middle, contained together no more than 15 mobs at any given time.

That's hardly a "survival". It's more of a boring "chase the mobs for air and fail".

EDIT: defence missions also suffer from this problem, but i forgot to include them for reasons. Solo, the mobs trickle in, there are so few it isn't even remotely entertaining, and the rounds take forever to finish.

 

Bottom line of this - hopefully it isn't too ranty, i'm not that mad about it actually - the spawn levels for solo players are terribly low. I have two different solutions:

  • First, assuming i'm the only one with this problem: set an option for the "solo handicap level" or whatever you want to call it, so that we can say by how much the spawn should be reduced when we go solo mode, from zero (equal to a team of 4) to what we currently have.
  • Second, assuming everybody has that but nobody talks about it, just crankup the spawn to "max regardless of how many of you are there. You're alone? Too bad" levels.

 

Cheers ^^

Edited by Autongnosis
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  • 1 month later...

Tried doing a long run on Derelict Survival a few hours ago and I just couldnt keep up with killing because too few enemies and too bad of a chance that they drop life support, either the chance of life support has to go up or more enemies, no idea about excevation, never did it solo.

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  • 2 weeks later...
11 hours ago, Devinee said:

i guess solo play is a unwanted game style. maybe usefull for farming ivara but i don't see any reason why i should do it for anything else

Well, for a number of reasons really, for example you can decide how long you want to stay and not be at the mercy of PUGs, without spending half an hour in recruit chat first; you can also pause the game and thus do extremely long stuff with breaks in between if something happens or you just feel like taking a break... Also, way less risk of crashing / lagging for lower end machines / connections.

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17 hours ago, Devinee said:

i guess solo play is a unwanted game style. maybe usefull for farming ivara but i don't see any reason why i should do it for anything else

The mercy of idiots and poor internet connections. It does not exist. 

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On 25.11.2016 at 9:25 PM, Autongnosis said:

Second, assuming everybody has that but nobody talks about it

I'm kinda scared talking about "feedback" cause for some reason everything that isn't "oh how awesome this feature is" ends up being threated as unneeded cryticism which falls as against code of conduct.

 

i do agree with you fully, however.

The same applies to defense mission. Altough they are more or less fine (mobs do spawn), the stream of mob to grind is petty, while rounds take forever to finish. Especially low level ones.

Edited by deothor
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I mostly run solo and stuff like what you're experiencing is why I have never done too long of a run in solo, since it inevitably goes from being boring-because-you're-grinding to being boring-because-there's-not-enough-to-kill-or-sustain-life-support. Kinda like what happened when DE had that survival alert with enemies at level 1,000. They wouldn't attack you, but it was impossible to survive with only the life support Lotus would give.

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49 minutes ago, deothor said:

i do agree with you fully, however.

The same applies to defense mission. Altough they are more or less fine (mobs do spawn), the stream of mob to grind is petty, while rounds take forever to finish. Especially low level ones.

Oh yeah, those are big offenders too. Will edit in the OP.

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It's absolutely possible to spend more time hunting enemies than killing them in Defence, a mode THEY ARE MEANT TO COME TO YOU, when going solo. Even in sortie defence I find myself searching for targets and this is meant to be the highest level non-raid content in the game. 

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one good idea would be to increase enemy spawn rate after 20 min survival or 20 rounds defense so people can't complain its impossible to farm solo. (like every 5min / rounds after this increases player count by one until its max of 4 players at 40 mins / rounds)

or just give use more solo modes like solo-easy, solo-challenging, solo-hard, solo-impossible

Edited by Devinee
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This would be great,got tired of survivals lately just because I have to pray to RNGesus for enemy spawns. Losing body count melee combo all the time because I just cant find enough enemies to keep it going,especially when going to activate life support,because,again, not enough enemies spawn.

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On 16.01.2017 at 9:49 PM, Ciaus said:

It's absolutely possible to spend more time hunting enemies than killing them in Defence, a mode THEY ARE MEANT TO COME TO YOU, when going solo. Even in sortie defence I find myself searching for targets and this is meant to be the highest level non-raid content in the game. 

Enemies defend themselves by hiding from us.

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I use solo mostly for missions I do not want to fail, like spy. There are people who will join missions just to ruin it for others, afking on high level endless missions, or spamming snowglobes on infested missions. Sometimes it's just more beneficial to go solo when you're doing something specific but tedious.

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I play 'invite only' mode. so i solo most missions of my choosing. I agree, the spawn rates are appalling, find a great choke-point and during the 1st 10mins of some tilesets(relic) or 20mins on others during survivals, and the mob come streaming through, negating the need to use any big life supports, but then spawn dries up, so i move to a choke point closer to the big LS, no mob spawns, now play hunt the mob, 5,10,15 per spawn point, no continuity, LS in the 20% range. I use on average 7 relics per run, after that the spawn rate and drop rate for traces is too low to sustain the mission, endless missions they are not.

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  • 2 weeks later...

This is still very much a harrowing problem, it's been bugging me for days - had to abort quite a few survivals because the trickle of enemies wouldn't sustain LS past the 30min mark... And solo defences have a very hard time giving you enough reactant per 5 waves to reliably open the relic.

It's sad that to properly enjoy a long mission you're basically forced into playing Nekros - and i LOVE nekros, don't want to think about the guiys who don't play him...

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As a mostly solo player myself, I don't exactly mind the low spawn rates in solo survival... but I do not like the absolutely abysmal drop rates of the life support. The frame I have played the most of is Ivara (love her to pieces) and between pickpocketing enemies and killing them I can barely go 10 minutes in a Whiba, much less ODS. Simply not enough life support. If one is going solo and they keep the spawn rate, every enemy should drop a capsule.

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As a primarily solo player:

Excavation: The enemy spawn rate itself is almost fine (i agree it could be buffed), it's the power carrier spawn rates that are the problem, and the fact that enemies are easily left behind when you move from one extractor to the next, lose aggro and then just sit there taking up the spawn limit. A despawn/teleport system for enemies that're too far away and increase in power carrier spawn rates in solo would fix most of those problems.

Survival: Same thing as excavation, except instead of power it's oxygen. Since there's no object to protect besides yourself, I'd say the enemy spawn rate should be buffed even more than with Excavation.

Defense: Rather than just trickle in bit by bit, the spawn rate in solo should be identical to in co-op, BUT the total spawn amount per wave should be lower than co-op. Make the waves short and intense rather than a long drawl.

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I have similar likes and issues with solo long-term missions, as a player with a not so great internet playing in groups can be hard, so I usually try to farm solo for most of my stuff. One solution for me(unconfirmed if this actually changes anything) but I run my missions in the friend or invite only, this sometimes can increase a number of enemies spawned because the Ai is generating enemies for not only you but for your potential friends and invitees who may join later.

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As a new player to the game, I also find solo survival very challenging for the same reasons mentioned above - not enough mobs and definitely not enough life support drops.

I generally don't play solo but sometimes I just want to play solo to see how I am doing without the support of other players.  I have definitely benefited from better players carrying me through survival and have had times where I was the one providing the support to help others.   

The longest solo run I have done so far is 45 minutes (does not compare with the 2 hours mentioned by the originator of this post) and then evac is needed due to the lack of LS not any issues dealing with the mobs.  I have tried moving from big LS to big LS and only using the LS at the 50% mark before moving to the next.  Ultimately I run out of big LS sites and dip below the 25% mark.  Then it is scramble time to get to evac before the air runs out.

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