From the Ashes - Difficulty Philosophy Discussion

Azherae

Swirl cake is like 90% of the reason why cake > pie.

You can go to a party with a swirl cake and get a mostly chocolate slice, someone else get a mostly plain/vanilla slice, everyone enjoys the 'same cake' at the 'same party'.

You can't do that with pie without ruining it.

This overextended analogy has been brought to you by the Patissier's Association of Eastern Verra.

Enigmatic Sage

@Astealoth in relation to WoW, most of the BIS items come from mythic raiding opposed to the mythic plus dungeon pool, especially when it comes to trinkets and items with unique bonuses that give a significant advantage. With that said, in order to do the actual challenging m+ tiers (25+) most groups wont even invite you if you dont have certain items from said raid difficulty. Then you get into only timing those dungeons by cheesing the game design and playing a meta class/spec.
Considering you can craft max ilvl gear, you dont really have a valid point about hiding anything behind a +20 as the loot pools drops at a +17 hero and a +16 and above for vault mythic.

The game is literally becoming easier each patch and expansion while making it more obtainable for high end loot through minimal skill checks now. You'll come across many over geared players in high end content that dont even know how to play their class or game for that matter. Sure, there is still many players who are quite good at the game but the games end game purpose is quite soulless. They've created a soulless dopamine driven reward system designed like a mobile game. This is what mainstream game developers do. Look at any of their IP's since blizzard was acquired by activision. Blizzard is just a name they parade around while almost all of the people who create blizzard dont even work there anymore and/or have anything to do with the company.

So im not sure what you're trying to get about 99% balance aspect considering their target audience is that casual weiner kid who wants to be fed transmogs and loot based on entitlement. The game hasn't been about the 1% in a very long time and content creators are to blame in a way as many community members (not just for wow) go to these creators for their opinions instead of learning for themselves.


Take soulsborne games as example, there is only one difficulty setting, people whine and cry about it but what they dont realise is you can literally cheese and one shot many bosses if you actually learned to play the game as the builds and item balancing is all over the place. So lets not try to cater to the 99% because thats how good games become soulless mainstream muppet games.

ChaosFactor

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

Difficulty should be scaled accordingly with competence vs gear grinding.
Yes, gear plays a relative crucial role in stats and output but gear can only get you so far. By not allowing and not encouraging players to develop integrally you will lure in a demographic that will just expect hand outs, carries and p2w so they can collect everything that is relatively pointless to the point where you have created a theme park game that hands out participation awards. There's enough soulless mainstream games that are continuously failing over time.

Difficulty like that is what caters to mainstream developers who just want people to get hooked and feel accomplished via dopamine stimulation instead of wanting to play the game for it's intended story and open world purpose. It will become a snowball effect and will ruin your game if you cater to these demographics. I dont think any of us want this game to become the next meme of AAA gaming.

This is why I advocate for a game that has immersive encounters that rely more on competence than out gearing the content per se. Making another meter chasing game is just going to result in another mainstream game with participation awards so everyone can feel... special....

Should content have multiple difficulties as a generalisation? yes but not to the point where there is 4 tiers and ways to bypass it all via theme park content for a game like AoC. I am personally looking for something that pulls me in and makes me want to progress in the game vs just hitting an end point in gear and transmogs so I can move on to the next alt. Need something that can intellectually stimulate me without feeling the encounter is just some boring scripted fight that you can memorise from youtube or worse.. add-ons.

Replay-ability should be fun and challenging instead of a predicable participation award slot machine.

The risk vs reward needs to be in the right spot so dont set the bar too low.

I suppose this would be a clear example of myself not doing good enough of a job of distinguishing between my system and the methods that modern games use. First of all, as I've said in other responses, the issues with people paying for boosts and relying off other players to provide them with gear.. I believe can purely be fixed through the game's design. Foremost, the game is designed in a way that gear is not entirely self reliant and requiring of skill, using others as a resource for achievement in the game, including just paying gold to give you a full set of gear you don't have to work to. It is a philosophy that I agree with that if you're able to provide some form of service, currency, or are simply friends, that you should be able to provide other players with power. The flip side of the coin is of course the team needing to be on top of dealing with RMTs surrounding the game, such as people having an Ashes boosting website.

I like the term that you used when you said "award slot machine", I understand that perception when it comes to the system that I have presented. However! I think that the truth of that reality and it's distaste when presented in modern games, is that the system is uninteresting, short, and simple. If the challenges presented in order to complete these challenges are in-depth, well made, and long form challenges, I believe that they would far surpass that standard. As I've mentioned before in response to another good comment, I believe that simply translating KPS into in game systems like quest givers or other forms of providing systems would remove the soullessness that you're alluding to when speaking about AAA games.

When you mention participation rewards to feel special, that's nowhere near where I want to land with my system. The reason I mention multiple times in the trust of other's achievements, is because none of the major rewards should be anywhere near simply through participation. Epic rewards should be a struggle, a long term effort with either repetition, research or raw skill. I don't want people to be handed a currency every time they complete a world event that you can build up and just cash out for an item. I want someone to be dragged through the annals of Verra, through fire in flame, to earn their gear. All I want, is for there to be more than enough paths of blood and conquest to choose from.

Perhaps that cleared some points up? Also #NoAddons praise the gods.

ChaosFactor

Astealoth wrote: »

I think most of the contention around difficulty is actually about systems inflexibility. Difficulty is relative. For some, no matter what is put out it will be too easy. For others, they will struggle to intense frustration before reaching the peak difficulty. Everyone has different interests, different brains, different hands. Someone with a persistent hand tremor is not going to be able to achieve the same precision as someone with a very steady hand. Both people can be customers with a good experience with good systems balance.

People hate high Mythic+ and Mythic raid in WoW because they are the exclusive source of stat sheet growth. These difficulty modes are balanced to only appeal to an extremely small portion of the community, but they offer rewards that impact every area of the game. Having 500 main stat locked behind +20 keys and Mythic raid makes the whole game play like crap for about 15 different reasons.

Lower difficulties should not be entirely unrewarding and peak difficulties should not be all-rewarding. It is better on a gradient rather than in brackets. Higher difficulty should be more rewarding. It would be nice to both have immense nearly impossible challenges to overcome, without those necessarily being required to have a good baseline experience. it is not that hard to give everyone what they need. The rabid hostile elite twitch player with PTSD brain fog from competitive losses who can barely act like a human being can be appeased without stripping the game away from the other 99.99% of the customer pool. Balance in all things!

Awesome addition, thanks for the input!

I could not agree more with the complaint about the 0.01% players that drive late game in many games. They spend so much time agreeing with each other in echo chambers like big Streamers chats that others who don't even participate in their nonsense infinite gameplay loop start to agree with them. (I would know because at some point I was one of those people)

Enigmatic Sage

ChaosFactor wrote: »

Enigmatic Sage wrote: »

Difficulty should be scaled accordingly with competence vs gear grinding.
Yes, gear plays a relative crucial role in stats and output but gear can only get you so far. By not allowing and not encouraging players to develop integrally you will lure in a demographic that will just expect hand outs, carries and p2w so they can collect everything that is relatively pointless to the point where you have created a theme park game that hands out participation awards. There's enough soulless mainstream games that are continuously failing over time.

Difficulty like that is what caters to mainstream developers who just want people to get hooked and feel accomplished via dopamine stimulation instead of wanting to play the game for it's intended story and open world purpose. It will become a snowball effect and will ruin your game if you cater to these demographics. I dont think any of us want this game to become the next meme of AAA gaming.

This is why I advocate for a game that has immersive encounters that rely more on competence than out gearing the content per se. Making another meter chasing game is just going to result in another mainstream game with participation awards so everyone can feel... special....

Should content have multiple difficulties as a generalisation? yes but not to the point where there is 4 tiers and ways to bypass it all via theme park content for a game like AoC. I am personally looking for something that pulls me in and makes me want to progress in the game vs just hitting an end point in gear and transmogs so I can move on to the next alt. Need something that can intellectually stimulate me without feeling the encounter is just some boring scripted fight that you can memorise from youtube or worse.. add-ons.

Replay-ability should be fun and challenging instead of a predicable participation award slot machine.

The risk vs reward needs to be in the right spot so dont set the bar too low.

I suppose this would be a clear example of myself not doing good enough of a job of distinguishing between my system and the methods that modern games use. First of all, as I've said in other responses, the issues with people paying for boosts and relying off other players to provide them with gear.. I believe can purely be fixed through the game's design. Foremost, the game is designed in a way that gear is not entirely self reliant and requiring of skill, using others as a resource for achievement in the game, including just paying gold to give you a full set of gear you don't have to work to. It is a philosophy that I agree with that if you're able to provide some form of service, currency, or are simply friends, that you should be able to provide other players with power. The flip side of the coin is of course the team needing to be on top of dealing with RMTs surrounding the game, such as people having an Ashes boosting website.

I like the term that you used when you said "award slot machine", I understand that perception when it comes to the system that I have presented. However! I think that the truth of that reality and it's distaste when presented in modern games, is that the system is uninteresting, short, and simple. If the challenges presented in order to complete these challenges are in-depth, well made, and long form challenges, I believe that they would far surpass that standard. As I've mentioned before in response to another good comment, I believe that simply translating KPS into in game systems like quest givers or other forms of providing systems would remove the soullessness that you're alluding to when speaking about AAA games.

When you mention participation rewards to feel special, that's nowhere near where I want to land with my system. The reason I mention multiple times in the trust of other's achievements, is because none of the major rewards should be anywhere near simply through participation. Epic rewards should be a struggle, a long term effort with either repetition, research or raw skill. I don't want people to be handed a currency every time they complete a world event that you can build up and just cash out for an item. I want someone to be dragged through the annals of Verra, through fire in flame, to earn their gear. All I want, is for there to be more than enough paths of blood and conquest to choose from.

Perhaps that cleared some points up? Also #NoAddons praise the gods.

I'm pretty fed up with games where leveling is pointless, you can pay for carries, pay for gold and pay for boosts with RMT. These studio's just killed off the adventure in their game to be theme parks and p2w. But I wont go down the path of reiteration of pointless end-game accomplishments haha

The game definitely needs to feel like players accomplished things whether it be from obtaining through crafting or dungeons, events etc. Different paths to accomplish this is important but definitely not in ways that the players abuse it for the easy route. I am definitely glad the end game is more player driven and open ended opposed to just getting a gear score, rating, a few t-mogs and mounts and then do it all over again on several alts.

I definitely like where you're going with it