Are there plans to enable player scaling for all zones, like they did for Orsinium?

spoqster

I love the fact that I can play Orsinium with all of my characters from level 16 to VR16. Given that I can't even run around in Glenumbra without one-shotting everything at level 16, this truly is a breath of fresh air.

If they applied the same system to the original zones and opened up silver and gold once you've beaten the main story with at least one character, we'd finally have an open game that let's players do what they want when they want, instead of level-locking them into specific zones at absurdly low difficulty.

This change would also open up the possibility of adjustable difficulty. Currently players are scaled up to V15 (afaik) in Orsinium. Here difficulty could translate to how far you are scaled up, with increasing the game's difficulty meaning you are scaled up less. So a player playing on a difficulty setting higher than normal, will enter the zone at a lower level than the zone's level. Playing on higher difficulty could be rewarded with higher drop rates or faster experience gain, but most importantly that option would allow players to set it so that they enjoy playing as much as possible.

The same difficulty settings could be added for instanced dungeons, giving players the option to run a v14 dungeon with v16 players scaled down to v13, v12, and so on, letting players find their individual sweet spot, while still awarding max level gear. This would also create a new genre of challenges and thus spice up the old content and ensure replayability.

Arkadius

In their last show they said they wanna focus on new zones and don't have plans to rework the old ones.

spoqster

Xiana wrote: »

In their last show they said they wanna focus on new zones and don't have plans to rework the old ones.

Well, it's not about reworking the content at all, only about adjusting the scaling mechanism so that it will scale players up and down to the respective levels of the original zones.

MrDerrikk

They'll probably scale Cadwells after the VR-CP conversion, but I don't see the starter zones having this added.

UltimaJoe777

All new DLC zones will scale for sure, but older zones will most likely not. After all, not much point in leveling if we scale everywhere we go.

Sausage

I think Silver and Gold zones should be CP-disabled, just lvl 50, after VR-removal, that should mean theres always someone in the zone with you. Its choice, empty zones and somekind of CP-progression or no CP-progression and zones with people in them, I'd personally go for latter. Why cant they give CP, but you cant use them until you go outside.

KerinKor

spoqster wrote: »

Xiana wrote: »

In their last show they said they wanna focus on new zones and don't have plans to rework the old ones.

Well, it's not about reworking the content at all, only about adjusting the scaling mechanism so that it will scale players up and down to the respective levels of the original zones.

@spoqster, this is impossible to do in this game and make it what you likely think it would.

Let's say you down-scale a VR16 to level 10, what skills does the level 10 get?

It can't possibly keep all the capped morphed skills of the VR16 as that clearly isn't a meaningful level 10 experience, so just what skills are given to the level 10 from those the VR16 has?

Or are you going to say keep all the skills just downsize the stats?

If you say that then I say no way to this, it would be entirely artificial and pointless as a level 10 with capped morph skills will still largely one/two-shot level 10 mobs.

spoqster

UltimaJoe777 wrote: »

All new DLC zones will scale for sure, but older zones will most likely not. After all, not much point in leveling if we scale everywhere we go.

Of course there is point in leveling. Mainly you get

1. More skill points, unlocked morphs, more gear options, etc.
2. You get to choose how your stats are allocated (scaling flat out increases the stats without min/maxing).

kupacmac

The real question to me is once the do away with VR levels, will difficulty scale to your CP level instead? Will mobs have a CP level? I really hope this is the case because currently I'm two-shotting regular mobs in Orsinium. The content trivial. There's no challenge whatsoever.

spoqster

KerinKor wrote: »

spoqster wrote: »

Xiana wrote: »

In their last show they said they wanna focus on new zones and don't have plans to rework the old ones.

Well, it's not about reworking the content at all, only about adjusting the scaling mechanism so that it will scale players up and down to the respective levels of the original zones.

@spoqster, this is impossible to do in this game and make it what you likely think it would.

Let's say you down-scale a VR16 to level 10, what skills does the level 10 get?

It can't possibly keep all the capped morphed skills of the VR16 as that clearly isn't a meaningful level 10 experience, so just what skills are given to the level 10 from those the VR16 has?

Or are you going to say keep all the skills just downsize the stats?

If you say that then I say no way to this, it would be entirely artificial and pointless as a level 10 with capped morph skills will still largely one/two-shot level 10 mobs.

Yes, I am only talking about the stat values. Don't change anything about the skills or morphs. And I don't see why it should be pointless. Yes, you'll have more skills and their morphs unlocked at higher levels. But different skills and their morphs don't do considerable more damage than the the vanilla skills. It's the level scaling of the stats that does the bulk (at least until you get to endgame and really maximise your dps).

This idea is all about making the original content accessible to anyone who is not playing the exact way ZOS built the leveling path.

• You play a few nights of PvP early on and level 10 levels doing? Boom, there's a complete zone you can't play in any more because it is below you level now (= way, way too easy).
• You are a completioninst and do every quest you can find on the way? You'll be constantly over-leveled by the time you reach level 25, making the rest of the single player game a terrible experience for you.
• You are bringing up an alt and you don't want to follow the exact same path you've followed before? Guess what, you can't.

Sure a maxxed out v16 that has all the right set items and does more than 15k single target damage will still be able to one-shot things, but that's not the main focus here. The main focus should be on letting a level 30 char go back and enjoy a level 8 quest. It's in ZOS best interest to give players access to all that content they already created.

For the v16, they could still have fun by setting the difficulty setting way up. But honestly the bigger problem I see there is that ESO allows too much of a power gap between players. You have a power gap of roughly the factor 5 or 6 (noob at v16 will do 5k, while a really good player might get up to 25k). In my opinion that is just too much, but that's another topic.

ADarklore

spoqster wrote: »

This change would also open up the possibility of adjustable difficulty. Currently players are scaled up to V15 (afaik) in Orsinium. Here difficulty could translate to how far you are scaled up, with increasing the game's difficulty meaning you are scaled up less. So a player playing on a difficulty setting higher than normal, will enter the zone at a lower level than the zone's level. Playing on higher difficulty could be rewarded with higher drop rates or faster experience gain, but most importantly that option would allow players to set it so that they enjoy playing as much as possible.

Name ANY MMO that offers "difficulty settings" for individual players? You can't, because there is NONE and there are reasons for it. It is one thing to battle level EVERYONE below a level to the same level and allow those above that level to retain their higher level, but impossible in an MMO to have variable difficulties among a large group of players.

Also, going back and recoding older content is not as easy as people make it sound, DCUO tried to do this type of scaling with their older content and it discovered it was impossible without major rework, so they switched it back to where it was originally. Coding new content is one thing, recoding older content is another and would involve a lot of effort that I think the majority of players would rather they spend time putting into new content; it isn't like ESO has a huge team of developers like they did during the initial game development.

Further, not everyone wants every bit of content to be scaled... players like myself who have never gone through Cadwell's Silver or Gold want to experience it with the ability to be a bit OP. Funny that it seems most of the players asking for older content to be scaled are not NEW players, but high level players who want to go back to older content... for what I don't know since they've already done the quests. MMOs have always been about progression not about continuing to run older content, and I think ESO's plan to make future content scale is a good idea, but forcing older content to scale and thus ruining game experience for newer players is NOT a good idea. If a player wants to be OP, then their ONLY opportunities for that are in the existing 'leveling' zones including Cadwell's Silver and Gold.

spoqster

kupacmac wrote: »

The real question to me is once the do away with VR levels, will difficulty scale to your CP level instead? Will mobs have a CP level? I really hope this is the case because currently I'm two-shotting regular mobs in Orsinium. The content trivial. There's no challenge whatsoever.

Haha, yeah, I was afraid of that. I am playing it with my low-level 17 character at the moment. It's great fun. Every mob fight is a challenge and requires concentration, and I even died a few times. That's how a single player game should play.

They really need to either disable CPs inside these single player zones or add a difficulty slider as suggested above. It feels like a huge rip-off if you spend $20 on content that poses no challenge. If a studio did that with a triple A game the outcry would be monstrous. Just imagine they released the new Tomb Raider in a way that players can one-shot everything on the highest difficulty setting from the get-go and literally can't die except for when they're falling off cliffs. That game would get disastrous reviews and nobody who bought it would bother playing it. That's the way ESO's single player zones feel at the moment.

I understand that they want to keep the game accessible, and I'm sure the game is in a good spot difficulty-wise if my 75 year old dad would want to play it. But in my book, if you're balancing a single player game for the lowest skill audience, you have to find a way to scale the difficulty. If you don't, you'll just exclude the majority of players.

ADarklore

spoqster wrote: »

But in my book, if you're balancing a single player game for the lowest skill audience, you have to find a way to scale the difficulty. If you don't, you'll just exclude the majority of players.

Um, you do realize this is NOT a 'single player game' right? It's an MMO and there are a different set of rules and adjustments necessary for a multiplayer game. I don't imagine going to CP will offer anything different than we currently see with VR... they will most like have two scale settings... those below a certain CP will be scaled up and those with higher CP up to cap will retain their existing stats.

kupacmac

spoqster wrote: »

kupacmac wrote: »

The real question to me is once the do away with VR levels, will difficulty scale to your CP level instead? Will mobs have a CP level? I really hope this is the case because currently I'm two-shotting regular mobs in Orsinium. The content trivial. There's no challenge whatsoever.

Haha, yeah, I was afraid of that. I am playing it with my low-level 17 character at the moment. It's great fun. Every mob fight is a challenge and requires concentration, and I even died a few times. That's how a single player game should play.

They really need to either disable CPs inside these single player zones or add a difficulty slider as suggested above. It feels like a huge rip-off if you spend $20 on content that poses no challenge. If a studio did that with a triple A game the outcry would be monstrous. Just imagine they released the new Tomb Raider in a way that players can one-shot everything on the highest difficulty setting from the get-go and literally can't die except for when they're falling off cliffs. That game would get disastrous reviews and nobody who bought it would bother playing it. That's the way ESO's single player zones feel at the moment.

I understand that they want to keep the game accessible, and I'm sure the game is in a good spot difficulty-wise if my 75 year old dad would want to play it. But in my book, if you're balancing a single player game for the lowest skill audience, you have to find a way to scale the difficulty. If you don't, you'll just exclude the majority of players.

I doubt seriously the devs would consider adding difficulty sliders. It's just not something most players would want or even use so I can't see them spending the resources to implement it. In fact, technically a player can control their level of difficulty by using less quality gear, but that sort of defeats the purpose of progression.

kupacmac

ADarklore wrote: »

I don't imagine going to CP will offer anything different than we currently see with VR... they will most like have two scale settings... those below a certain CP will be scaled up and those with higher CP up to cap will retain their existing stats.

I really hope you're wrong about that. I don't know what your VR/CP levels are, but do you find Orsinium content to be challenging?

spoqster

ADarklore wrote: »

spoqster wrote: »

This change would also open up the possibility of adjustable difficulty. Currently players are scaled up to V15 (afaik) in Orsinium. Here difficulty could translate to how far you are scaled up, with increasing the game's difficulty meaning you are scaled up less. So a player playing on a difficulty setting higher than normal, will enter the zone at a lower level than the zone's level. Playing on higher difficulty could be rewarded with higher drop rates or faster experience gain, but most importantly that option would allow players to set it so that they enjoy playing as much as possible.

Name ANY MMO that offers "difficulty settings" for individual players? You can't, because there is NONE and there are reasons for it. It is one thing to battle level EVERYONE below a level to the same level and allow those above that level to retain their higher level, but impossible in an MMO to have variable difficulties among a large group of players.

Also, going back and recoding older content is not as easy as people make it sound, DCUO tried to do this type of scaling with their older content and it discovered it was impossible without major rework, so they switched it back to where it was originally. Coding new content is one thing, recoding older content is another and would involve a lot of effort that I think the majority of players would rather they spend time putting into new content; it isn't like ESO has a huge team of developers like they did during the initial game development.

Further, not everyone wants every bit of content to be scaled... players like myself who have never gone through Cadwell's Silver or Gold want to experience it with the ability to be a bit OP. Funny that it seems most of the players asking for older content to be scaled are not NEW players, but high level players who want to go back to older content... for what I don't know since they've already done the quests. MMOs have always been about progression not about continuing to run older content, and I think ESO's plan to make future content scale is a good idea, but forcing older content to scale and thus ruining game experience for newer players is NOT a good idea. If a player wants to be OP, then their ONLY opportunities for that are in the existing 'leveling' zones including Cadwell's Silver and Gold.

I think you may have misunderstood my post. I'm not asking them to scale the content. I am asking them to scale the player TO the content. They could even make it voluntary, so that you can switch it on and off for individual characters.

What that would mean is that your level 45 character will be scaled down to the stat levels a level 10 character would have when venturing into a level 10 zone. That's it. I'm not asking that any bit of the existing game should be taken away.

It would be kind of you to make the effort to understand my suggestion before flaming it.

The way I see it ZOS did a lot of great work and spent a lot of money on the original leveling zones. With the long life span of a game like this, I see many players wanting to come back once or twice a year to replay some of the content with a new character. Currently this is hardly possiple, because with the CP, the ability to craft gear and the sheer improvement in their playstyle the whole leveling experience is dull as chicken dung. And more importantly, when bringing their second or third character, I am assuming most players want a bit more diversity. They want to pick when to do which quest in which zone, mix it up with dungeon runs, dailies and PvP, and still want to be able to go back to finish the questline in Glenumbra - because they want unlock the skyshards, the zone progression and because it's fun.

All I am asking is that that should be possible, and the technical challenge of scaling a character from level 40 down to level 8 should be manageble since they already have the technology in place to scale characters up.

Justice31st

My main v16 is also a full crafter so I need these old zones to get the specific leveled materials.

spoqster

kupacmac wrote: »

spoqster wrote: »

kupacmac wrote: »

The real question to me is once the do away with VR levels, will difficulty scale to your CP level instead? Will mobs have a CP level? I really hope this is the case because currently I'm two-shotting regular mobs in Orsinium. The content trivial. There's no challenge whatsoever.

Haha, yeah, I was afraid of that. I am playing it with my low-level 17 character at the moment. It's great fun. Every mob fight is a challenge and requires concentration, and I even died a few times. That's how a single player game should play.

They really need to either disable CPs inside these single player zones or add a difficulty slider as suggested above. It feels like a huge rip-off if you spend $20 on content that poses no challenge. If a studio did that with a triple A game the outcry would be monstrous. Just imagine they released the new Tomb Raider in a way that players can one-shot everything on the highest difficulty setting from the get-go and literally can't die except for when they're falling off cliffs. That game would get disastrous reviews and nobody who bought it would bother playing it. That's the way ESO's single player zones feel at the moment.

I understand that they want to keep the game accessible, and I'm sure the game is in a good spot difficulty-wise if my 75 year old dad would want to play it. But in my book, if you're balancing a single player game for the lowest skill audience, you have to find a way to scale the difficulty. If you don't, you'll just exclude the majority of players.

I doubt seriously the devs would consider adding difficulty sliders. It's just not something most players would want or even use so I can't see them spending the resources to implement it. In fact, technically a player can control their level of difficulty by using less quality gear, but that sort of defeats the purpose of progression.

I don't think it would be that much work. All the difficulty slider would do is to scale you up to v14 or v13, instead of v15 (or more abstractly put to n levels below the level of the zone you are in). Yes, there needs to be a system in place to keep track of the difficulty setting for individual characters and it needs to be tested. But now that the system is already in place and widely used, it's more of a minor addition, rather than a full new feature.

spoqster

Justice31st wrote: »

My main v16 is also a full crafter so I need these old zones to get the specific leveled materials.

Are you refering to the scaling of the mats to the crafting skill level in Orsinium?

Justice31st

spoqster wrote: »

Justice31st wrote: »

My main v16 is also a full crafter so I need these old zones to get the specific leveled materials.

Are you refering to the scaling of the mats to the crafting skill level in Orsinium?

Yes.

spoqster

Justice31st wrote: »

spoqster wrote: »

Justice31st wrote: »

My main v16 is also a full crafter so I need these old zones to get the specific leveled materials.

Are you refering to the scaling of the mats to the crafting skill level in Orsinium?

Yes.

Well, they could just leave the mat spots as is, e.g. not scale them.

Personally I think that whole idea of scaling the crafting mats was not the best idea in the first place. Running around with an alt that has not invested in crafting skills you end up finding only level 1 mats.

But to go a bit further, the whole idea of using alts for crafting is a bit clumsy anyway. It's a nuisance to switch to another character to craft gear, with all the swapping around of mats and gear through the bank. It's even worse if you split up your crafting between multiple characters. And the option of leveling the same craft on multiple characters is just ludicrous.

The easiest solution would be to make crafting account based, like they did with the champion system, and remove it from the skill tree (so that the perks follow directly from the overall account xp in the individual crafts).

spoqster

Justice31st wrote: »

spoqster wrote: »

Justice31st wrote: »

My main v16 is also a full crafter so I need these old zones to get the specific leveled materials.

Are you refering to the scaling of the mats to the crafting skill level in Orsinium?

Yes.

For the recotd, I think it would have been smarter to scale the mats to the character level, rather than the character's crafting skill.

Now the economy just gets flooded with low level mats. The other way would have been more healthy for the economy, and would have incentivized players to upgrade their skill to do something with the mats.