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Pantheon doing level scaling? Seriously?
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This would be an idea i 100% would not play,i want the world to have an identity and not some endless loop to become a dungeon looter.
Ever heard of the great White Dragon,,oh yeah he is that really tough creature our level 75 group had a tough time beating,,oh wait we just beat him with our level 1 group....sigh.
It turns every last creature/npc into a level 1 meaningless entity,just some target for loot.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I believe that level scaling is an anathema to RPGs. Hate it. I too hated GW2 and ESO.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Surprise, surprise.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
In one zone you beat the snot out of dragons and you move to the next only to get owned by a wolf. There is zero logic in that, while a pack of wolves can kill an adult human it is rare and a sword wielding plate bearing human would still have a good chance, even with limited training. A huge dragon that can burn down towns should logically be harder.
Not to mention that fighting 20 inexperienced people alone would be incredible hard if not impossible no matter how experienced you are. With levels that is usually easy if they are lvl 1 and you are maxed out.
Besides, I assume we are talking about downward scaling, not upward. That will probably mean that you are still rather powerful when downleveled but can't just steamroll an entire zone (GW2 does this and it works fine there).
I am all for downleveling as long as it is done right.
The way it actually works is when you have a noob weapon and no armor that fight takes you 30 seconds and you almost died twice but it's doable.
When you're level 110 the same fight takes you 3 seconds and there was never any chance of dying.
That's how it actually works. There's still progression and power gain. What there isn't is gathering 20 of those mobs and killing them all in one AOE shot.
― CD PROJEKT RED
"... the "influencers" which is the tech name we call sell outs now..."
__ Wizardry, 2020
That is the equivalent of not only your date has a penis, but also hers is bigger than yours.
Playing together with friends is nice, no doubt, but if the cost for doing so creates a situation that doesn't make sense you can pretty much just design your typical themepark BS with 'everyone plays' attitude.
Preventing power leveling would be a goal worth to pursuit. So would be stopping instance boosting (if Pantheon had instances, that is). But deliberate power decrease in group play is not.
"Oh, i know these ogres want to kill us all, but this wouldn't be any fun if i just one-shot all of them. Tell you what, i'll fight with my dagger and my left hand only so that our lives can still hang by a thread, okay?"
The older style of linear progression from zone to zone sounds a lot more theme park than scaling systems that let one adventure organically.
I've played both GW2 and ESO and each works fine in their way.
In these games the more developed character will always have more depth and breadth than those less so, so the concept of increased power over time is preserved, just in a more flexible fashion that better retains the value of all content for all players.
I wasnt sure about it in ESO but for that game and for me it is a great addition.
"See normal people, I'm not one of them" | G-Easy & Big Sean
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing FO76 at the moment.
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
To anyone following this project, just be prepared for the implementation to be something other than you are expecting.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Level Scaling keeps my immersion.
Prevents a single player from completely dominated a newb zone.
Oh well. :P
Yes, it's surprising how many "authorities" here make comments about games they've either never played at all or only played in the most trivial sense. The important thing when trying to bullshit like this on the forums is to say it like it's a fact which he did.
The problem is he claims to play the game (mostly Cyrodiil) so he's not unfamiliar with it. He's just outright lying and bullshitting trying to provide his own unique perspective.
Sorry for the strikethough typo above. The forum software doesn't let you backspace so you can't fix your mistakes, much like how Kano describes level scaling in ESO. I'm not lying. It's my perspective.
traveller, interloper, anomaly, iteration
-- MMO gamers don't like innovation no matter what they say
-- MMO gamers don't like challenge as much as they claim
-- MMO gamers don't value immersion as much as they claim either
Without level scaling characters trivialize mobs at the 8th or 9th level delta. So all old content is easy and trivialized. So that throws the love of challenge argument out the window. The amusing irony here is that this sort of level disparity is what will make soloing possible.
Don't worry. I seriously doubt this team will pull off level scaling. Arena Net can barely do it. ZoS is the only studio that's done it well. It's not easy. I'm pretty sure they'll go for the easy out which is a downscaling "mentor" system. Talk about a lack of ambition and imagination. I hope that's not true, but I suspect it's so.
traveller, interloper, anomaly, iteration
The way I see it, without level scaling, only specific and relatively weak monsters / PVE enemies inevitably become easy and trivialized once your character becomes more powerful which I, personally, consider reasonable.
I believe that only in MMOs with specific design choices classifying content by character level, such as including zones classified by level (e.g. 1-10 lvl zone, 11-20 lvl zone) or instanced dungeons / battlegrounds sorted by levels (e.g. dungeon for levels 14-18), complete areas of content (e.g. a full lower level zone, low level dungeon) become obsolete or trivialized as you put it.
In an MMO where there is a mix of monsters / points of interest for various levels in each zone or dungeon, the only content that becomes trivialized are the specific monters.
Or what else does inevitably become trivialized?
As far as immersion goes, I believe it is more realistic if wolves and boars are adequate enemies when you are an inexperienced (low level) warrior with a fork and hardly any armor and if then you move up to fighting stronger monsters like dragons when you become a full geared veteran with a weapon imbued with magic. To me it makes more sense that after becoming powerful in terms of experience and equipment, you kill a boar (or any similar weak / low level monster) with one hit than if you were to fight it as an equally strong opponent.
Regarding challenge, the fantasy world should provide you with challenge regardless of your relative power (level / equip). You just do not seek the challenge by fighting with wolves and boars, but rather by finding a more powerful enemy.
I do not know about "innovation", but I do not agree that opposing level scaling implies not liking challenge and not valuing immersion. In case of the latter, I think it implies the opposite.
I despised ESO's system because, to me, it felt a lot like rendering combat to a sideshow along your journey to collect skyshards. With GW2, I could go into zones as high as I wanted until I found a good balance of risk vs. reward. And I still get to enjoy experience progress towards my masteries by heading to the lowbie zones and being downscaled. As in ESO, gear can make you more powerful than a toon at that specific level, but it does a good job of tuning character stats to the zone you're in.
EDIT- Not to mention that downscaling allows me to help out lowbies in my guild without it being a complete waste of time for me. If I haven't yet completed that map, it's almost as useful an endeavor for me as it is the lowbie to follow them around the zone hitting the vistas, POIs, hearts, and events.
They arent doing level scaling.
Stay in school, bro.Next came dungeon level scaling. The reason for that change had more to do with how long it was taking players, especially those Qd as DPS, to find a group to run dungeons. Initially it was just scaling to the group leader's level but that meant that higher level players were getting useless drops and no XP... so they changed it to scale all players to max level same as in Cyrodiil.
Next came DLC zones. They wanted players of any level to be able to buy and play in those zones. The motivation here was obviously marketing and it was actually a bit rough but it did set the trend for releasing content that was usable by all and not just by those already at max level as is usually the case when most MMOs add new zones.
One Tamriel was the logical extension of the same idea to the whole game.
I have to say that I was originally skeptical that they could pull it off without dumbing things down too much so that true brand new players could handle it with few skills and none of the better ones. I spent most of the 3 months that patch was in beta playing on the PTS and I was pleasantly surprised by how using a an extra decreasing bolster (that goes from 100% down to 0% extra from levels 1-34) on top of the normal bolster that everyone under the new universal mob level (CP 160) gets they didn't need to tone down mob difficulty for max CP players - they in fact increased it a bit. It worked.
Although the game thematically still plays best if done in the original pre-scaling way, since the story progressions still reflect that, there is enough zone-specific story content in ESO that it still works pretty well if you do the zones in some other semi random order.
As a matter of fact the main reason other than story to be in any one particular zone instead of others is that each zone also got its own themed loot that comes from the quests there, mob drops, treasure chests, etc. That change coincided with One Tamriel but it was anything but coincidental: it's the secret sauce that keeps all zones relevant. You don't just go to noob zones to hep your noob mate level and get his noob gear. You go there because that gear may very well be something you can also use at your higher level, and it drops at your level... always.
I actually have zero problems with their way of scaling now. I find it very enjoyable and every zone has a mix of level 4s to CP660+ players playing together or nearby.
― CD PROJEKT RED
"... the "influencers" which is the tech name we call sell outs now..."
__ Wizardry, 2020
You killed that dragon with your bare hands and now a level 1 kobold is a problem.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
My guess is he plays MMOs primarily for the progression (I know I do) and derives great satisfaction from finding the most efficient route to max power. (Which can be lorded over lesser mortals of course.)
The game play itself is largely unimportant, and it should be neither annoying or overly inane.
Immersion, story, all largely irrelevant, who cares why or how, just kill, mine, or crush in a never ending spiral of power.
Once the pinnacle is actually obtained, its usually either time to reroll or find another game.
Kano appears to enjoy doing all of this, in about 10 games at a time.
"See normal people, I'm not one of them" | G-Easy & Big Sean
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing FO76 at the moment.
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I dunno, I never thought I would enjoy GW2 as well as I have been the past few weeks. Something about the feel of ESO scaling is off-putting to me.
Raquelis in various games
Played: Everything
Playing: World of Warcraft Classic, Stuff
Wants: The World
Anticipating: Everquest Next Crowfall, Pantheon