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Adjustable Difficulty
Flashfirez23
Member, Founder, Kickstarter
So, Lord of the Ring Online. Recently, added adjustable difficulty to their game. Where the harder you make enemies the more XP and better loot you get to make the difficulty worth the effort. I think this could be a great addition to Ashes. Everyone has a different level that they want to play mmos at and I think that’s perfectly fine. Some people like easy games while other people like more challenging content. I think this would please everyone and allow people to have the experience they want. What do you think of Ashes doing something like this?
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Or is it that the player is just 'choosing to set their own character to be stronger' and the Mobs stay the same?
I think this would change the mobs. Like the mobs would take less damage and do more damage to you if you chose a higher difficulty. Or the opposite if you chose an easier setting.
And what about group PvE content? What if you are on the hardest settings and a party member is on the easiest? How do you balance that?
Say you’re fighting a world boss and another group shows up, forcing true PvX content. How do you balance that in light of your suggestion?
I think this would just apply to PVE. But, maybe someone could come up with something cool for PVP. I haven’t thought of that but it could be interesting.
Someone might go hardcore to get some good loot, while another group couldn't give 2 shits about the loot so they go on the easiest difficulty and can now mess with anyone else's farm in the simplest way, because they're not getting hit anywhere near as hard as their victims.
Instanced content will be balanced however Intrepid wants to balance it, so there's no need to implement difficulty options there.
Also, we already, supposedly, allegedly, theoretically, WhoTheFuckKnowsIfItsInTheGameStill-ly have scaling difficulty that's based on your previous clears within a dungeon, so if you want harder content - just git gud.
The game is PVX, if you are doing pve you can be pved at any point.
Personally i don't think there is anything cool about people able to play "easy mode" Content should be created based on difficulty intended with some content being easier and some being much more difficult towards end game.
Also AoC has difficulty scaling where the more players interacting with the content the mobs becoming stronger leading up to a raid. (which is somewhat more organic)
I mean Lord of the Rings has open world PVP content and it works don’t see why Ashes can’t make it work especially since this is voluntary. If you don’t want the challenge you can choose something easier. And really the tired git gud cliche that played out 🙄 you can miss me with that. Especially since it doesn’t make sense in this case since I actually want the game to be harder. I fully intend on engaging with the tougher endgame content as well. Just would prefer if the game is not cake walk. But, also know that others may want something more chill. So, a way to satisfy other players as well.
What I find even worse about this is, that these suggestions are made at a point where we have no idea about the balancing and the actual gameplay of the game yet. How big is your distrust in Intrepid that you are already asking for a "post launch balancing tool"? And the expectation of low compentency and growing potential of players is equally gloomy.
It's a hard "No!" for me, sorry. I'm at a point where I suggest that people who have no faith in the abilitiy of game designers are best served by not participating - especially since they as non-game designers won't be able to fix it either.
i just dont see the point and i cant really make the case for it, or against it since i don't have all the information about everything aoc. but IS would probably consider it? idk
There will be tiered difficulty in Ashes, depending on your node level.
Also in PvP, the more corruption you have, the more difficulty increases.
Some players hope to increase their PvP difficulty...
One in particular gave players a time limit to destroy runes before he spawned - each rune gave the boss a different ability. If you killed one rune, you had the easiest version of the boss with what ever ability was associated with the rune you killed. If you killed two, you had a slightly harder version with two abilities, and so on.
There was another mob that had a harder version if you pulled the last two encounters of the zone together. They would work together making it a much harder fight.
As a mechanic in MMO's in general, this kind of thing works. However, it is probably not something that I could see working well in Ashes specifically, as it is a system that really needs a game dedicated to instanced content.