Devs, suggestion: automatic fight difficulty scaling depending on player numbers

SkaiFaith · May 21

For years players not only asked for higher difficulty but also asked fights to have better scaling.
I'll use names chosen by devs for upcoming difficulty levels and throw some random numbers to give an idea....something like, for a Dragon in Elsweyr:
1-12 Players = Adventurer difficulty
13-24 Players = automatic switch to Seasoned difficulty
25-36 Players = auto switch to Master difficulty
37 and above Players = auto switch to Vestige difficulty

This kind of automatic scaling would benefit all the players that want a challenge and don't want to feel trolled from players on lower difficulty levels.
This is a suggestion that was made in years past; I'm not saying anything new.

Please Devs consider this idea, since you are now willing to experiment more. This could also allow you to go back and adjust some content (like Harrowstorms) that players have often expressed frustration finding it to be too hard at the default difficulty when there are no players around; while also avoiding "event zergs" to disintegrate a Dragon in 10 seconds.

Thanks for your attention and work.

EDIT: while I used challenge difficulty terms, this has nothing to do with challenge difficulty. It's not about that. Those terms were just to simplify. This is a whole different issue.

AzuraFan · May 21

Scaling world events to match the number of players makes sense. But most of them need to be scaled down, not up, given that the problem occurs when there's only 1 or a few players there. When there's a lot of players around, I don't see the problem.

SkaiFaith wrote: »

This kind of automatic scaling would benefit all the players that want a challenge and don't want to feel trolled from players on lower difficulty levels.

How would this benefit players who don't want a higher difficulty? Remember, the increased difficulty is supposed to be opt-in. And like I said, for world events, the problem is usually that there aren't enough players around to do them, so they need to scale down most of the time, not up.

OsUfi · May 21

I huge supporter of introducing difficulty levels. U50 is the main reason I returned to the game.

That said, I also believe ZoS do a good job of letting us play our own way. Any difficulty increase to what's already in-game should be opt-in allowing for those of us who run soul magic themed builds, or the the one bar wardens with all animal companion skills, alongside the 200 DPS lunatics.

As for scaling, I honestly think that's over complicating something that Night Market did really well. Group finder has been bumping. The difficulty increase was spot on. The "jump in and roll with it" nature of the zergs rolling around Night Market has made it feel like a low-risk, low commitment, no worries trial to me. You can rock up with any build, follow the group, and get something.

lillybit · May 21

OsUfi wrote: »

I huge supporter of introducing difficulty levels. U50 is the main reason I returned to the game.

That said, I also believe ZoS do a good job of letting us play our own way. Any difficulty increase to what's already in-game should be opt-in allowing for those of us who run soul magic themed builds, or the the one bar wardens with all animal companion skills, alongside the 200 DPS lunatics.

As for scaling, I honestly think that's over complicating something that Night Market did really well. Group finder has been bumping. The difficulty increase was spot on. The "jump in and roll with it" nature of the zergs rolling around Night Market has made it feel like a low-risk, low commitment, no worries trial to me. You can rock up with any build, follow the group, and get something.

The thing about night market tho, is people are doing it currently so it's easy to find a group to tag along with. Unless there's an event on, hardly anyone is doing harrowstorms for example.

Say NM is made permanent. How easy will it be to do anything there a year after that when it's a dead zone?

Solstice siege camps are scaled for huge groups because of the wall event, but there's not always others wanting to do it already and it's only coming up to a year since release.

Scaling for things like world events should always have been a thing. Dolmens already have basic scaling for the amount of people doing them, so the mechanic already exists.

It's great having massive fights that feel meaningful, rather than Alik'r dolmens that just melt, but surely it's better to have this content completable than just avoided. With scaling you'd still get the same big fights if a big group turns up, it just stops being impossible if they don't.

If for no other reason, it's really hard to get things like leads from old world events if you weren't around to farm them when they were new.

Blood_again · May 21

SkaiFaith wrote: »

For years players not only asked for higher difficulty but also asked fights to have better scaling.
I'll use names chosen by devs for upcoming difficulty levels and throw some random numbers to give an idea....something like, for a Dragon in Elsweyr:
1-12 Players = Adventurer difficulty
13-24 Players = automatic switch to Seasoned difficulty
25-36 Players = auto switch to Master difficulty
37 and above Players = auto switch to Vestige difficulty

Please NO!
That will have effects beyond your expectations.

Simple take:
My 11 newcomer friends and I try to farm a dragon. We are the weak group, so we barely manage to do it.

At the next spot one (just one) random player joins the fight. What happens next?
Dragon attacks become Seasoned +100% dmg immediately. Our wannabe tank gets one-shotted by each second attack.
Each dot will kill our wannabe dds and healers in 2 ticks instead of 4.
This battle will take double time because of the Seasoned sponge.
We desperately wipe on the same type of boss we successfully killed 2 minutes ago.
Just because one player joined the battle. And this is the factor you can't predict or regulate, because it is not an instance.

While this gameplay turn may be fun for some really strong players, for many it won't, I guess.
As a global result, the players' toxicity against each other in the zone will rise dramatically.

AlterBlika · May 21

What if I want to solo a dragon on vestige? Why would I be locked to adventurer? This scaling feels super unintuitive

Sluggy · May 21

There's a lot of technical reasons why this likely wouldn't work out very well. First and foremost on my list would be performance. The servers are often over taxed as it is. Tracking that much extra state about every single enemy in every single fight across all shards in all zones on all machines could carry a significant cost.

There's also many many gameplay considerations. For examples: Are the difficulties set at spawn time? Dynamically as players come and go? What is considered "being involved" in any given fight? Distances, time spans, healing and damage output/input would all need to be factored somehow. How fuzzy are the barriers between different tiers at this level? What happens when people leave a fight or their character dies? As someone above mentioned about instantly progressing to the next difficult because a random person walked in, it could become very unintuitive that more people suddenly make a fight harder instead of easier.

LadyGP · May 21

Honestly - anything that puts a strain on the servers by having to do checks non stop I'm against.

No one ever thinks about the serverssssssssssss.

Thoriorz · May 22

No thanks.

Aliniel · May 22

I've been saying we need bosses and encounters to scale based on number of players engaging them for a while. But it shouldn't increase dmg taken. It should only affect the enemy HP so the fights don't end in 1.7s when 30+ players start blasting the boss.

All enemies are designed in some way they are intended to be battled. Let's say world bosses are designed for a group of 4 players (just speculating for the purposes of an example). When there are more, the boss HP should go up to account for the extra player(s).

This problem is extremely evident during various events which are pretty much just a zergfest where 30+ people wait 5 minutes to blast a boss in 1.7s. Which part of this is actually "playing the game"? We don't need the boss to one shot 17 people because they have no idea how the mechanics work. We just need the boss not to die instantly so he actually lives up to the name "world boss".

SkaiFaith · May 22

I won't quote every person who disagrees but I'll point out that - I said in OP mine was just an example. I used challenge difficulty terms for simplicity in explaining the idea. And the numbers "I've thrown them at random" - everything can be adjusted.

You don't have to take OP as words set in stone. It's the concept what matters.

As someone said: this already happens at dark anchors - difficulty already scales based on number of players. Thing is: every BIG fight should be like that, scaling both up and down.
I'm not a dev and I don't pretend to do the dev's work; that's their job to figure out how to implement. Mine is a suggestion I've seen many times over the years which I think would be beneficial and would like the devs to consider.

Blood_again · May 22

SkaiFaith wrote: »

As someone said: this already happens at dark anchors - difficulty already scales based on number of players. Thing is: every BIG fight should be like that, scaling both up and down.

Dark anchors are a good sample that shows how problematic this scaling is.
A big group of strong players kill the enemies before they are rendered. A small group of newcomers still can wipe on the anchor.
It is only an amount of mobs in waves that scaled. Nothing serious, not like damage or resists. Not for the boss.

So the plain number of players in an encounter can't be a single criteria for scaling. However, anything that will be added to it raises a computation complexity, which is bad for such functions as WB+group real-time evaluation.