EthanolMuffins wrote: »

ZOS_Finn wrote: »

So, to answer some questions on Challenge Difficulty and instancing combat. This is going to be a little bit technical to hopefully explain the limitations from that perspective.

Everything in the game has a "weight" to it. This includes monsters (very weight heavy), interactable objects (these very but can be weight heavy), etc. Weight is determined by how much information is stored in a given object. I mention this because we have formulas for how much "weight" we can attribute to a given zone or instance of a zone and that is based on the intended player cap. So, for instance, Overland zones generally have no weight restrictions because we expect a lot of players in those zones so the weight attributed to the zone is justified and won't adversely affect the server. It gets much more tricky in situations where we expect reduced players in a given zone. The most restrictive are solo instances or fight spaces. We have a lot of development tools we use to make sure we do not exceed weight capacities in these spaces so it should feel seamless to players.

Each zone is controlled on the backend by something that determines which of our servers will spin up which zones when new copies are needed. In Greymoor, we saw the effects of the zones being spun up were not correctly attributing weight. Trials would spin up on weight heavy controllers which would result in adverse conditions in any zone connected to that controller. Our engineers took great pains to reorganize the code in these controllers to make sure the zones were even and weight was correctly distributed.

I bring this up to highlight the technical aspects of how the game operates from a monster and zone perspective to further illustrate that spinning up new zones based on difficulty without weight concerns and attribution would be extremely detrimental to the entire game. Needing to essentially double all of the available zones in the game without regard to population and weight would mean the entire server would have some pretty major issues regardless of where you would be playing. Even in Delves and Public Dungeons, locations that were not created with these concerns in mind, would potentially be breaking for the server.

We want Challenge Difficulty to be a fun experience for players and, while most of the feedback is regarding the desire for us not to split players from a design standpoint, the technical concerns are most likely bigger than that. This is not said to dismiss feedback but more provide context.

Please DO keep providing feedback. We have some fixes in the works coming for CD. Mainly around the calculations we are making on the backend so that player damage is more in line with expectations but that is not exhaustive and we continue to monitor things. We are taking a look at the Master difficulty in particular as thats where I think most folks will find their groove and we want to make that as smooth as possible.

Really appreciate how communicative and transparent y'all have been lately, can say it was one of the key factors for me returning to the game. But with the difficulty splitting, I understand the technical issues and desire not to split the playerbase too much. In my opinion the only splitting that would need to happen is for story bosses in the zone as I think that is the source of most feelsbad moments that would occur.