Mobs that are hard when you are the right level are still easy when you are downleveled in any system I ever seen, the difference is that they aren't grey and could kill you if you play poorly enough.
And don't bring logic into the leveling mechanics, you can beat dragons in a zone at the high end of it so you move to the low end of next zone and have problem with goblins.
If you want immersion you probably should get rid of levels altogether or at least drop the powergap between noobs and vets like there was no tomorrow.
Realistically, how many ill trained militia fighters do you think it takes to defeat a master? 5? 12? Certainly no-one could be no more then 20, doesn't matter if they are Miamoto Musashi, William Wallace, Richard Lionheart or whoever.
In a MMO a max level character can kill a thousand lvl 1s in the same fight without any effort or risk at all. If you are talking silly it is strange that you didn't mention that part.
Grey mobs don't drop anything because the crap they have basically is below your character to even care about, the illogical part is the carrying capacity and how much vendortrash we pick up.
Logic? ROTFL
how many mobs of any type do you think could get at that master at once? Lets say 10. If that master can take 10 at once then he can take 1000 until fatigue is a factor.
And anyway this is a game, everyone knows and has come to accept how it works. Unless games are going to release once and never add any new content, you have to accept how this works. Scaling has too many downsides and removes player choice. I'd be somewhat ok with an option to turn zone scaling on if you wish, but dont force the rest of us to fight same difficulty mobs with the difficulty set at a lowest common denominator (too low) throughout the game.
Let us chose to step up to higher lvl mobs. Players have always had the ability to adjust their difficulty, scaling removes that. Easy mode leveling is not entirely the fault of the game as some have suggested.
No way. There are historical sources about people taking down more then a few opponent themselves but I can't think of anyone ever taking down more then 14 opponents. It is not only fatique, you also will take hits slowing you down and bleeding you dry.
Even facing them 1 at a time in a door wouldn't work. If it was logical someone would have done it in the several thousands of years in recorded history. Also, you don't seem to get how taxing a swordfight actually is. There are a few historical records of duels in full plate that gone on for 30 minutes but no master could defeat that many opponents in that time, only Groo can do that.
And having the insane powergap is certainly not a must, most pen and paper RPGs have way lower powergaps (like Vampire, Shadowrun, R.I.F.T.S, Warhammer fantasy RPG, Chaosiums BRP/CoC)... While D&D/Pathfinder are the most popular I have a feeling that there are more people enjoying game with lower powergaps if you add them together.
MMOs are actually far worse then the worst P&P system (that would be Pathfinder) powergapwise. It is fine that some MMOs are that way but there honestly is little choice and lower powergap can actually be fun as well, it requires more tactics and strategy but is still very rewarding.
As for scaling: Why would you go back to lower level zones when you outlevel them in a regular MMO? There is no reason besides possibly to farm low level crafting mats so the only thing scaling gives you is the possibility to revisit those zones and get something out of it, something you can skip if you don't want to.
Or do you actually play grey zones?
This is not history. In real life people dont have any form of self healing that negates the tiny nicks and scratches. Do not try to equate this to real life.
And again, it is just a matter of fact that you have to accept in an ongoing RPG with many expansions over time. Scaling is a cheap fix that ruins too much of what many people look for in these games. At the least it needs to be an option people can turn on or off.
No i do not play grey zones except as you say for farming low lvl mats. Scaling gives you the ability to revisit those zones sure, but it also does many of the other detrimental things I've already mentioned. If the game is not introducing new content, the old zones are going to get boring regardless of whether the zones are scaled up to some (too easy anyway) low floor difficulty.
if you want to experience low lvl zones, start a new toon. Wow also gave you the choice to turn off experience. If you're lvling 2x as fast as you want to, turn off experience half of the time. Fixed. Don't ruin the game for other people with forced scaling.
@Loke666 that's why I'm a fan of scaling content up, but not down.
Richard Lionheart may be able to take on 3-4 ill-trained militia at once, but he sure as shit wouldn't be able to down a Dragon, to continue with your analogy. With scaling both ways, the militia in the starter zones are far too close in terms of danger and challenge as the drakes. All of a sudden, 2-3 ill-trained militia men can down the Dragon themselves. With only scaling upwards, it still eventually present the problem, but the Dragon is "floored" (think opposite of capped) at a power level much higher than the militia. It's a good balance between gameplay and immersion.
That really depends on how strong a dragon is, in most legends and stories you need at least a group of heroes to take down a dragon, and you need wits as well. The exception I can think of is Sigurd in the poetic Edda and he was rather powerful with a magic sword and while he killed the dragon the dragon killed him as well. And the question is how powerful that dragon really was.
I would say that any MMO where you can solo dragons is way too easy.
Also, I think Richard could take down more like 8 well trained militia based on what I read about him. I don't think he could solo a dragon though.
@Loke666 that's why I'm a fan of scaling content up, but not down.
Richard Lionheart may be able to take on 3-4 ill-trained militia at once, but he sure as shit wouldn't be able to down a Dragon, to continue with your analogy. With scaling both ways, the militia in the starter zones are far too close in terms of danger and challenge as the drakes. All of a sudden, 2-3 ill-trained militia men can down the Dragon themselves. With only scaling upwards, it still eventually present the problem, but the Dragon is "floored" (think opposite of capped) at a power level much higher than the militia. It's a good balance between gameplay and immersion.
That really depends on how strong a dragon is, in most legends and stories you need at least a group of heroes to take down a dragon, and you need wits as well. The exception I can think of is Sigurd in the poetic Edda and he was rather powerful with a magic sword and while he killed the dragon the dragon killed him as well. And the question is how powerful that dragon really was.
I would say that any MMO where you can solo dragons is way too easy.
Also, I think Richard could take down more like 8 well trained militia based on what I read about him. I don't think he could solo a dragon though.
You are thinking about this way too hard, forgetting that games need to release new content, and basically asking for RPGS that dont have levels at all. I think that is something even you would find boring once you experience all the content once.
I should say "once you experience some of the content once", because really if all mobs are scaled to the same difficulty, the only difference is pixel art.
OP is misinformed and does not share legit info. Level scaling applies up to level 90 (Pandaria). Max level characters (110) are unaffected, meaning that if a lvl 110 player goes into a low level zone nothing happens, everything is still grey to him.
@Loke666 that's why I'm a fan of scaling content up, but not down.
Richard Lionheart may be able to take on 3-4 ill-trained militia at once, but he sure as shit wouldn't be able to down a Dragon, to continue with your analogy. With scaling both ways, the militia in the starter zones are far too close in terms of danger and challenge as the drakes. All of a sudden, 2-3 ill-trained militia men can down the Dragon themselves. With only scaling upwards, it still eventually present the problem, but the Dragon is "floored" (think opposite of capped) at a power level much higher than the militia. It's a good balance between gameplay and immersion.
That really depends on how strong a dragon is, in most legends and stories you need at least a group of heroes to take down a dragon, and you need wits as well. The exception I can think of is Sigurd in the poetic Edda and he was rather powerful with a magic sword and while he killed the dragon the dragon killed him as well. And the question is how powerful that dragon really was.
I would say that any MMO where you can solo dragons is way too easy.
Also, I think Richard could take down more like 8 well trained militia based on what I read about him. I don't think he could solo a dragon though.
You are thinking about this way too hard, forgetting that games need to release new content, and basically asking for RPGS that dont have levels at all. I think that is something even you would find boring once you experience all the content once.
I should say "once you experience some of the content once", because really if all mobs are scaled to the same difficulty, the only difference is pixel art.
agree with this , i hate scaling in every game it has shown its ugly face ....
Trivializes and dumbs down content till every single fight feels exactly the same ...
It was terrible in Oblivion .. worse in GW2 .. made ESO a skip thru the park ... etc...
@Loke666 that's why I'm a fan of scaling content up, but not down.
Richard Lionheart may be able to take on 3-4 ill-trained militia at once, but he sure as shit wouldn't be able to down a Dragon, to continue with your analogy. With scaling both ways, the militia in the starter zones are far too close in terms of danger and challenge as the drakes. All of a sudden, 2-3 ill-trained militia men can down the Dragon themselves. With only scaling upwards, it still eventually present the problem, but the Dragon is "floored" (think opposite of capped) at a power level much higher than the militia. It's a good balance between gameplay and immersion.
That really depends on how strong a dragon is, in most legends and stories you need at least a group of heroes to take down a dragon, and you need wits as well. The exception I can think of is Sigurd in the poetic Edda and he was rather powerful with a magic sword and while he killed the dragon the dragon killed him as well. And the question is how powerful that dragon really was.
I would say that any MMO where you can solo dragons is way too easy.
Also, I think Richard could take down more like 8 well trained militia based on what I read about him. I don't think he could solo a dragon though.
You are thinking about this way too hard, forgetting that games need to release new content, and basically asking for RPGS that dont have levels at all. I think that is something even you would find boring once you experience all the content once.
I should say "once you experience some of the content once", because really if all mobs are scaled to the same difficulty, the only difference is pixel art.
And you assume that no levels means no progression system. Do you think pen and paper games like Warhammer fantasy RPG, Shadowrun and Vampire don't have any progress since they don't have levels?
Think again, they all have progress. The big difference is more that while you will get better mobs wont grey out. They will be incredible easy if we are talking about low power mobs in noob zones but pull enough numbers on you at the same time and you will die.
In a P&P game like Shadowrun a total beginner sniper could kill your vet character if he gets lucky enough, it is not likely but it happens now and then. There a character becomes around 5 times as powerful when you played a long time, not a thousand times like in Wow but that is still progress and adding expansions to a system like that is no harder then to a system like Wow.
And while you in theory could kill something very powerful with a noob character in those games people who try to "experience the whole game" as a noob will die horrible countless times and get little to show for their effort, the difference is just that it is possible to kill a tough mob now and then.
Heck, Guildwars were basically leveless once Factions came out, you made your 20 levels in a few hours like a tutorial. Trust me, all mobs were not of the same difficulty once you hit 20 there and neither should it be in any leveless system.
Even UO used a variant of leveless progression, not a really good one in my opinion but it worked just as well as any system at the time.
There is basically 2 differences in a leveless system: Gear is not levelocked. Usually you lock it by stats or by some feat mechanics instead, or you just use the same gear better as you progress (which works fine in PnP but maybe not as well as in gear progression MMORPGs).
You don't gain a zillion hitpoints every time you gain enough XP. You can still gain HP by increasing stats or by speccing feats but you wont go from 50 to 50 000 HP, more like from 50 to 500 but that is no biggie and is balanced by not increasing the damage as much and by avoiding getting hit.
Also, it is usually easier to determine the power of a monster in leveless games. Huge dragons and similar things are always dangerous while goblins tend to die easily no matter what zone you are in.
While I'm not a fan of difficulty scaling as a concept, it's undeniable that it improved the leveling experience in World of Warcraft. Granted, they could have re-tuned it without scaling, but either way the older content now is vastly improved over what it was like pre-scaling. Seriously, it was a mindless faceroll from 1 to 85 before this last patch.
Yes, they could but in Wows case they would have to revamp the entire zone and level system then. Probably by cutting the levels in half and revamping all lower level zones.
It would be way more job, this is a simple fix that works.
Level scaling may actually convince me to try the game again. Im really enjoying level-scaling in ESO and if WoW does something similar, it would be a lot of fun imo.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
@Loke666 that's why I'm a fan of scaling content up, but not down.
Richard Lionheart may be able to take on 3-4 ill-trained militia at once, but he sure as shit wouldn't be able to down a Dragon, to continue with your analogy. With scaling both ways, the militia in the starter zones are far too close in terms of danger and challenge as the drakes. All of a sudden, 2-3 ill-trained militia men can down the Dragon themselves. With only scaling upwards, it still eventually present the problem, but the Dragon is "floored" (think opposite of capped) at a power level much higher than the militia. It's a good balance between gameplay and immersion.
That really depends on how strong a dragon is, in most legends and stories you need at least a group of heroes to take down a dragon, and you need wits as well. The exception I can think of is Sigurd in the poetic Edda and he was rather powerful with a magic sword and while he killed the dragon the dragon killed him as well. And the question is how powerful that dragon really was.
I would say that any MMO where you can solo dragons is way too easy.
Also, I think Richard could take down more like 8 well trained militia based on what I read about him. I don't think he could solo a dragon though.
You are thinking about this way too hard, forgetting that games need to release new content, and basically asking for RPGS that dont have levels at all. I think that is something even you would find boring once you experience all the content once.
I should say "once you experience some of the content once", because really if all mobs are scaled to the same difficulty, the only difference is pixel art.
And you assume that no levels means no progression system. Do you think pen and paper games like Warhammer fantasy RPG, Shadowrun and Vampire don't have any progress since they don't have levels?
Think again, they all have progress. The big difference is more that while you will get better mobs wont grey out. They will be incredible easy if we are talking about low power mobs in noob zones but pull enough numbers on you at the same time and you will die.
In a P&P game like Shadowrun a total beginner sniper could kill your vet character if he gets lucky enough, it is not likely but it happens now and then. There a character becomes around 5 times as powerful when you played a long time, not a thousand times like in Wow but that is still progress and adding expansions to a system like that is no harder then to a system like Wow.
And while you in theory could kill something very powerful with a noob character in those games people who try to "experience the whole game" as a noob will die horrible countless times and get little to show for their effort, the difference is just that it is possible to kill a tough mob now and then.
Heck, Guildwars were basically leveless once Factions came out, you made your 20 levels in a few hours like a tutorial. Trust me, all mobs were not of the same difficulty once you hit 20 there and neither should it be in any leveless system.
Even UO used a variant of leveless progression, not a really good one in my opinion but it worked just as well as any system at the time.
There is basically 2 differences in a leveless system: Gear is not levelocked. Usually you lock it by stats or by some feat mechanics instead, or you just use the same gear better as you progress (which works fine in PnP but maybe not as well as in gear progression MMORPGs).
You don't gain a zillion hitpoints every time you gain enough XP. You can still gain HP by increasing stats or by speccing feats but you wont go from 50 to 50 000 HP, more like from 50 to 500 but that is no biggie and is balanced by not increasing the damage as much and by avoiding getting hit.
Also, it is usually easier to determine the power of a monster in leveless games. Huge dragons and similar things are always dangerous while goblins tend to die easily no matter what zone you are in.
You have got to be kidding me lol... UO was not level-less progression and nothing like the scaling we were talking about. You "leveled" skills rather than your toon, that is all. In the beginning rats were a challenge. Killing a gazer was something scary you had to work up to. You gave an excellent example of what level scaling kills here. Variety, pregression, varying difficulty = out the window with level scaling.
I just don't get the people that must do every mindless quest in every zone and must get exp doing it. To me the content is the zone not the quests to kill x mobs. WOW has tons of zones, leveling through more zones rather than fewer slower zones is better as far as I am concerned. Why would you want less variety?
You could avoid outleveling your precious uncreative repetitive quests by either removing half the quests from the game so you dont even notice, or turning off exp, which is already an option. I play it both ways. I am actually sometimes somewhat of a completionist myself and will often finish off a zone with green or even grey quests when I am bored. Other times I want to push the difficulty up to red mobs. Next alt I might level through completely different zones and entirely skip the ones I did on the last toon. It is some peoples own fault that they feel the need to get full exp every second of their game time and yet whine about zones being wasted and leveled through too fast. You already had options open to you to solve all these problems. Level scaling is just a cheap generic solution that at least should be optional, though imo unnecessary. When it is forced it removes variety and shits on progression.
I also have to say that some of the last few posts have been talking more about the power gap between minimum and max level. That issue is really a completely different one than that of level scaling. The power gap could certainly be lessened in WoW. Thing is with many years and many expansions, that gap is always going to grow. Again though, not tied to level scaling.
That said it really should be a realtively simple fix to tune power gap however you want without level scaling. Level power in wow is pretty much linear, but the slope of that line could easily be lessened with a simple multiplier.
Power (5) x lvl (10) = 50.
Change the 5 to 4.5, powergap lessened. Change it to .1 (or whatever) and add a base amount before the multiplier so that minimum lvl is only 50% weaker than max. This can apply to mob stats, character stats, gear stats, skill base damage, everything at once or each with separate multipliers, and could be based on current max level, so that overall relative gap is the same no matter how many levels they add to the game. Just saying, level scaling is not a smart fix for power gap. If you want no gap at all as per full level scaling, then imo RPG's are not for you.
You have got to be kidding me lol... UO was not level-less progression and nothing like the scaling we were talking about. You "leveled" skills rather than your toon, that is all. In the beginning rats were a challenge. Killing a gazer was something scary you had to work up to. You gave an excellent example of what level scaling kills here. Variety, pregression, varying difficulty = out the window with level scaling.
I just don't get the people that must do every mindless quest in every zone and must get exp doing it. To me the content is the zone not the quests to kill x mobs. WOW has tons of zones, leveling through more zones rather than fewer slower zones is better as far as I am concerned. Why would you want less variety?
You could avoid outleveling your precious uncreative repetitive quests by either removing half the quests from the game so you dont even notice, or turning off exp, which is already an option. I play it both ways. I am actually sometimes somewhat of a completionist myself and will often finish off a zone with green or even grey quests when I am bored. Other times I want to push the difficulty up to red mobs. Next alt I might level through completely different zones and entirely skip the ones I did on the last toon. It is some peoples own fault that they feel the need to get full exp every second of their game time and yet whine about zones being wasted and leveled through too fast. You already had options open to you to solve all these problems. Level scaling is just a cheap generic solution that at least should be optional, though imo unnecessary. When it is forced it removes variety and shits on progression.
UO was leveless, you are thinking of progression less, no-one wants that. I want progression, I just want a lower powergap then MMOs usually have and to pick my upgrades instead of getting it is a package. I also want to get rid of the daamage reduction you get when something of lower level hit something of higher.
And I agree, there are way too many boring quests in the average MMO, they should cut down a lot ofd them and make larger, harder and better written ones instead. More is not better, quality is better.
I don't see why anyone would play through a grey area but I guess some people actually do. What the scaling do (practically) is that it leaves an area green. And yeah, I still don't see the problem with that.
I also have to say that some of the last few posts have been talking more about the power gap between minimum and max level. That issue is really a completely different one than that of level scaling. The power gap could certainly be lessened in WoW. Thing is with many years and many expansions, that gap is always going to grow. Again though, not tied to level scaling.
That said it really should be a realtively simple fix to tune power gap however you want without level scaling. Level power in wow is pretty much linear, but the slope of that line could easily be lessened with a simple multiplier.
Power (5) x lvl (10) = 50.
Change the 5 to 4.5, powergap lessened. Change it to .1 (or whatever) and add a base amount before the multiplier so that minimum lvl is only 50% weaker than max. This can apply to mob stats, character stats, gear stats, skill base damage, everything at once or each with separate multipliers, and could be based on current max level, so that overall relative gap is the same no matter how many levels they add to the game. Just saying, level scaling is not a smart fix for power gap. If you want no gap at all as per full level scaling, then imo RPG's are not for you.
Actually, powergap do have something to do with scaling. With high powergap you outlevel a zone way faster and need something like scaling far more.
And yes, scaling is basically a bandaid that doesn't really help the problem that much but it helps a little. What I want is a powergap that means that a lousy vet will just barely be beaten in PvP by an excellent noob.
And yes, zero progression is not something for RPGs (besides MYST).
Comments
And again, it is just a matter of fact that you have to accept in an ongoing RPG with many expansions over time. Scaling is a cheap fix that ruins too much of what many people look for in these games. At the least it needs to be an option people can turn on or off.
No i do not play grey zones except as you say for farming low lvl mats. Scaling gives you the ability to revisit those zones sure, but it also does many of the other detrimental things I've already mentioned. If the game is not introducing new content, the old zones are going to get boring regardless of whether the zones are scaled up to some (too easy anyway) low floor difficulty.
if you want to experience low lvl zones, start a new toon. Wow also gave you the choice to turn off experience. If you're lvling 2x as fast as you want to, turn off experience half of the time. Fixed. Don't ruin the game for other people with forced scaling.
I would say that any MMO where you can solo dragons is way too easy.
Also, I think Richard could take down more like 8 well trained militia based on what I read about him. I don't think he could solo a dragon though.
I should say "once you experience some of the content once", because really if all mobs are scaled to the same difficulty, the only difference is pixel art.
Trivializes and dumbs down content till every single fight feels exactly the same ...
It was terrible in Oblivion .. worse in GW2 .. made ESO a skip thru the park ... etc...
Do you think pen and paper games like Warhammer fantasy RPG, Shadowrun and Vampire don't have any progress since they don't have levels?
Think again, they all have progress. The big difference is more that while you will get better mobs wont grey out. They will be incredible easy if we are talking about low power mobs in noob zones but pull enough numbers on you at the same time and you will die.
In a P&P game like Shadowrun a total beginner sniper could kill your vet character if he gets lucky enough, it is not likely but it happens now and then. There a character becomes around 5 times as powerful when you played a long time, not a thousand times like in Wow but that is still progress and adding expansions to a system like that is no harder then to a system like Wow.
And while you in theory could kill something very powerful with a noob character in those games people who try to "experience the whole game" as a noob will die horrible countless times and get little to show for their effort, the difference is just that it is possible to kill a tough mob now and then.
Heck, Guildwars were basically leveless once Factions came out, you made your 20 levels in a few hours like a tutorial. Trust me, all mobs were not of the same difficulty once you hit 20 there and neither should it be in any leveless system.
Even UO used a variant of leveless progression, not a really good one in my opinion but it worked just as well as any system at the time.
There is basically 2 differences in a leveless system:
Gear is not levelocked. Usually you lock it by stats or by some feat mechanics instead, or you just use the same gear better as you progress (which works fine in PnP but maybe not as well as in gear progression MMORPGs).
You don't gain a zillion hitpoints every time you gain enough XP. You can still gain HP by increasing stats or by speccing feats but you wont go from 50 to 50 000 HP, more like from 50 to 500 but that is no biggie and is balanced by not increasing the damage as much and by avoiding getting hit.
Also, it is usually easier to determine the power of a monster in leveless games. Huge dragons and similar things are always dangerous while goblins tend to die easily no matter what zone you are in.
It would be way more job, this is a simple fix that works.
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Witcher 3 got it right: scale content up, don't scale content down.
I just don't get the people that must do every mindless quest in every zone and must get exp doing it. To me the content is the zone not the quests to kill x mobs. WOW has tons of zones, leveling through more zones rather than fewer slower zones is better as far as I am concerned. Why would you want less variety?
You could avoid outleveling your precious uncreative repetitive quests by either removing half the quests from the game so you dont even notice, or turning off exp, which is already an option. I play it both ways. I am actually sometimes somewhat of a completionist myself and will often finish off a zone with green or even grey quests when I am bored. Other times I want to push the difficulty up to red mobs. Next alt I might level through completely different zones and entirely skip the ones I did on the last toon. It is some peoples own fault that they feel the need to get full exp every second of their game time and yet whine about zones being wasted and leveled through too fast. You already had options open to you to solve all these problems. Level scaling is just a cheap generic solution that at least should be optional, though imo unnecessary. When it is forced it removes variety and shits on progression.
That said it really should be a realtively simple fix to tune power gap however you want without level scaling. Level power in wow is pretty much linear, but the slope of that line could easily be lessened with a simple multiplier.
Power (5) x lvl (10) = 50.
Change the 5 to 4.5, powergap lessened. Change it to .1 (or whatever) and add a base amount before the multiplier so that minimum lvl is only 50% weaker than max. This can apply to mob stats, character stats, gear stats, skill base damage, everything at once or each with separate multipliers, and could be based on current max level, so that overall relative gap is the same no matter how many levels they add to the game. Just saying, level scaling is not a smart fix for power gap. If you want no gap at all as per full level scaling, then imo RPG's are not for you.
And I agree, there are way too many boring quests in the average MMO, they should cut down a lot ofd them and make larger, harder and better written ones instead. More is not better, quality is better.
I don't see why anyone would play through a grey area but I guess some people actually do. What the scaling do (practically) is that it leaves an area green. And yeah, I still don't see the problem with that.
And yes, scaling is basically a bandaid that doesn't really help the problem that much but it helps a little. What I want is a powergap that means that a lousy vet will just barely be beaten in PvP by an excellent noob.
And yes, zero progression is not something for RPGs (besides MYST).