Previous posting on this subject: [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/36448#comment-36448][b]Link[/b][/url]
Team Scaling Formula:
(Team Leader Difficulty Level * 3) + (Players on Team) - 1 = Minion Budget per spawn group
Limitations:
Difficulty Level as used by the Team Scaling Formula can never be lower than the number of Players (actually) on the Team.
Minion Budget equivalencies (uses x! mathematical function except for Pets):
[list][*]2 Pets = 1 Minion
[*]1 Minion = 1 Minion (duh…)
[*]1 Lieutenant = 2 Minions
[*]1 Boss = 6 Minions
[*]1 Elite Boss = 24 Minions
[*]1 Arch Villain = 120 Minions
[*]1 Monster = 720 Minions
[*]1 Giant Monster = 5040 Minions[/list]
These equivalencies can be used as a guideline for raw Hit Point totals for each rank of Foe NPC.
1 Player Team
[list][*]x1 Difficulty = 3 Minion Budget
[*]x2 Difficulty = 6 Minion Budget
[*]x3 Difficulty = 9 Minion Budget
[*]x4 Difficulty = 12 Minion Budget
[*]x5 Difficulty = 15 Minion Budget
[*]x6 Difficulty = 18 Minion Budget
[*]x7 Difficulty = 21 Minion Budget
[*]x8 Difficulty = 24 Minion Budget[/list]
2 Player Team
[list][*]x(1-2) Difficulty = 7 Minion Budget
[*]x3 Difficulty = 10 Minion Budget
[*]x4 Difficulty = 13 Minion Budget
[*]x5 Difficulty = 16 Minion Budget
[*]x6 Difficulty = 19 Minion Budget
[*]x7 Difficulty = 22 Minion Budget
[*]x8 Difficulty = 25 Minion Budget[/list]
3 Player Team
[list][*]x(1-3) Difficulty = 11 Minion Budget
[*]x4 Difficulty = 14 Minion Budget
[*]x5 Difficulty = 17 Minion Budget
[*]x6 Difficulty = 20 Minion Budget
[*]x7 Difficulty = 23 Minion Budget
[*]x8 Difficulty = 26 Minion Budget[/list]
4 Player Team
[list][*]x(1-4) Difficulty = 15 Minion Budget
[*]x5 Difficulty = 18 Minion Budget
[*]x6 Difficulty = 21 Minion Budget
[*]x7 Difficulty = 24 Minion Budget
[*]x8 Difficulty = 27 Minion Budget[/list]
5 Player Team
[list][*]x(1-5) Difficulty = 19 Minion Budget
[*]x6 Difficulty = 22 Minion Budget
[*]x7 Difficulty = 25 Minion Budget
[*]x8 Difficulty = 28 Minion Budget[/list]
6 Player Team
[list][*]x(1-6) Difficulty = 23 Minion Budget
[*]x7 Difficulty = 26 Minion Budget
[*]x8 Difficulty = 29 Minion Budget[/list]
7 Player Team
[list][*]x(1-7) Difficulty = 27 Minion Budget
[*]x8 Difficulty = 30 Minion Budget[/list]
8 Player Team
[list][*]x(1-8) Difficulty = 31 Minion Budget[/list]
Spawn Groups would have a "Minion Budget" allocated to them determined by the Number of Players and the Difficulty Setting of the Team Leader which would then be used to randomly determine the composition of Foe NPCs mixes within Spawn Groups.
Note that a Team of 1 Player on x8 Difficulty could, using this system, potentially encounter a Spawn Group consisting of a single Elite Boss, with no Bosses, Lieutenants, Minions or Pets accompanying them.
For reference, the Hit Point scaling in City of Heroes was as follows:
[list][*]2 Pets = 1 Minion
[*]1 Minion = 1 Minion
[*]1 Lieutenant = 2 Minions
[*]1 Boss = 6 Minions
[*]1 Elite Boss = 12.4 Minions
[*]1 Arch-villain = 65.6 Minions[/list]
Note that in City of Heroes, Elite Bosses and Arch Villains typically had [s]unfairly[/s] very strong [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Archvillain_Resistance]Debuff and Mez Resistances[/url], which potentially could be reduced (or even eliminated?) if their Hit Point pool were simply doubled as proposed here, making them potentially more susceptible to Debuffing (including Control Powers) in City of Titans.
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I'd love to see a "bias" setting, in addition to the "difficulty" setting. Basically, a "quality" switch in addition to "quantity".
The bias would initially have three settings:
[list]
[*]Balanced: spawn groups have a normal composition.
[*]Hardened: spawn groups have an increased tendency to have fewer, but stronger (boss, etc.) mobs.
[*]Overwhemling: spawn groups tend to have more, but weaker, mobs.
[/list]
We could easily add finer granularity to this slider.
Further, the effective bias for the team would be an average of the bias settings of the team members. So if you have a team of three, one on each setting, you get Balanced spawns,
but if you're on Tanker Tuesday and everyone's a herding addict biased to Overwhelming, then you better be ready to get zerged. Or you could be in a group that leans to Hardened and you're taking down lots of bosses and the occasional EB.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
There was talk on other threads about having "reputation" with particular villain groups. The idea being that as you continue to annoy certain vaillain groups they go a bit harder on you. Perhaps until you finish a particular mission string, at which point they back off (because you're so awesome and invincible, one presumes.) I really liked this idea from the RP point of view. Could a system like this have that folded into it? Or would that need to be a whole seperate thing?
Any sort of Reputation with Foe NPC Groups is kinda sorta outside the fringes of this particular topic (or at least the way I envision this topic applying and being understood). That's because I see the whole Reputation with Foe NPC Groups thing being something that affects the Aggro State of the Foe NPC Group in question ... as in Aggro On Sight or merely just Aggro When Attacked or whatever. So the Reputation is effectively a "friendliness" modifier that determines the hostility levels towards your character. That doesn't seem to make a "good fit" to me for being used as a modifier on Spawn Group [b]Sizes[/b] inside of instanced Missions, since that's something of a "square peg, round hole" sort of mismatch in my mind. Whether or not a Foe NPC Group is disposed towards friendliness towards your character ought to have no bearing whatsoever on whether or not that Foe NPC Group is staffing their bases (or not) when you come calling.
To be honest, the kind of thing you're talking about WarBird is basically the x1 to x8 Difficulty level that influences [i]how much opposition[/i] you'll be going up against in your Missions ... so ... been there, done that (already).
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Just model "Reputation With NPC Groups" as a plus or minus modifier to difficulty and/or bias. This would be in addition to the player-set difficulty level.
And make sure that, if the NPCs actually do take out your character, your rep with them heads back towards normal.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
Redlynne, do you know the minion budget for monsters and giant monsters in COH?
It seems like you are proposing to make the lower level mobs about the same as COH, but to increase the challenge level for Elite Bosses and Archvillains? That sounds good.
Perhaps you could clarify how many minions would spawn for an 8-man team set at level 4, as in an AE farm? Seems like either 31 or 124...
Nope. I'm not even sure that City of Heroes "worked" via a Minion Budget system like I'm suggesting here, although I suspect that it did (and didn't fit the formula I've proposed).
The City of Heroes baseline is what everyone is expecting anyway, so why not "start" there and work your way outwards?
Repeating from Original Post:
That means that Spawn Groups need to "add up to" the equivalent of 31 Minions due to having 8 Players on the Team. I don't know what you're referring to with "level" here since I'm only addressing the [i]Quantity of Foe NPCs[/i] present, with equivalencies of exchanges for different "ranks" of Foes, so your "level 4" variable literally has no meaning (except maybe in a [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_koan]Zen Koan[/url], and even then I'd be hard pressed to think the computer could use it "philosophically").
2 Pets = 1 Minion
1 Lieutenant = 2 Minions
1 Boss = 6 Minions
1 Elite Boss = 24 Minions
31 Minion Budget variations:
[list][*]62 Pets = 31 Minion Budget (think horde of Rikti Monkeys)
[*]31 Minions = 31 Minion Budget
[*]15 Lieutenants + 2 Pets = 31 Minion Budget
[*]4 Bosses + 7 Minions = 31 Minion Budget
[*]1 Elite Boss + 2 Lieutenants + 3 Minions = 31 Minion Budget[/list]
... and so on and so forth.
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I don't know if I agree, that the CoH baseline is what everyone is expecting. Not all contributors to the KS even played CoH. And maybe what we need to see if more than just 3 minions/1 lt = PC. I was surviving that easily on any AT I played, no enhancements. Some ATs just took longer to get through them than others (I don't find that to be a problem myself). So maybe up the difficulty for them.
Maybe take the equivalent ranks and modify them for a better experience!
I never liked the idea of AVs being downgraded to EB's either. We have these named awesome NPCs and we make them weaker than they're supposed to be always felt like a terrible thing to do.
AVs were the perfect, build to solo or build a team to take them down. People would say "but I can't solo them" and I just have to think "So what?" Not many could solo Giant Monsters, we didn't downgrade them.
As someone who built to solo AVs in CoH, I know while I could solo quite a few of them, somewhere just harder and took multiple tries at, or some I couldn't solo no matter what and needed to do a team up (usually with just one other person)...which just made the game more fun. Made for a good mixture of soloability and teaming.
Why I'm for being able to run TFs solo (but not downgrading the AVs)...some of them I'd love to try and solo (and I did) but teaming made it go by much faster. :)
This is where you start running into problems of being able to "Pick Your Playthings" in terms of being able to control the opposition you're going to be running into. That's because some builds are going to be better off dealing with a few strong Foes while other builds are advantaged by facing off against weenie hordes for mass slaughter via AoEs. So the biggest dividing line is going to be on the Single Target vs AoE Damage split, and I'm *very* leery of doing anything that would favor "Nuke 'Em From Orbit" lawnmower tactics, builds and strategies in which Players have a way to "bias" the opposition they're going to face inside of instances so as to better favor THEIR build strengths. Doing that would encourage and reinforce a min/max tendency to "control" the sorts of opposition you (typically) have to fight against, and I'm thinking that would be a Bad Idea™ for gameplay.
Why? What's "normal" in this case? Zero, because they defeated you? Is your Reputation score simply just cut in half (enter [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes]Zeno's Paradox[/url])? Do Reputations have negative (hostile) numbers as well as positive (friendly)?
To be fair, the whole Reputation system would need to be far better defined than it (notionally) is before I'd want to use it to influence/bias Spawn Group Scaling so as to get a better handle on what the Reputation system is "supposed to do" for you. For one thing, I'm thinking right now that the Reputation with Foe NPCs might even be "relevant" only when you're in your Secret Identity, and have no bearing at all on your Super Identity ... or just simply have "less" of a meaning in your Super Identity. For these and other reasons, I'd really want to deal with the question of Reputation with NPC Groups in an entirely separate topic.
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Agreed. Let's not make it to easy for people to go "Oh, I'll just face a mission with lots of minions to AOE or just make the mission one AV for equal amounts of XP but caters to my ST focused build."
CoH had a bit of a way of doing it, but let's not get to extreme on making it easy to do.
Repeating from Original Post:
Think you can solo more than a 3 Minion Budget? Raise your difficulty.
Already ahead of you on that one Brand X.
What you just said [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzVxsYzXI_Y&t=111]makes no sense whatsoever[/url] in any context that seems relevant to this topic. Are you talking about adjusting the equivalencies between different Ranks of Foe NPC?
Yeah, well ... not every Primary/Secondary/Mastery combination was well equipped to handle AVs (solo or otherwise). Melee types were often more "durable" against AVs (because they were "allowed" to have Defenses and Resistances of non-negligible values) while Controllers and Debuffers were often "robbed" of most of their purpose and functionality against AVs, so it kind of ran the gamut. I'd prefer to think that AV level Foe NPCs would be reserved for Team Oriented Storytelling, such as Task Forces and the like ... while Elite Bosses could be the equivalent of a [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Nemesis#Fake_Nemesis]Fake Nemesis[/url] instead of being "merely" a Boss, for example.
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Which was the whole point of this whole thread, right? Players picking how much opposition they face?
Exactly! Which means the player can face what they're suited for, [i]or not,[/i] at their discretion. It's a fine-tuning of the difficulty level concept: the bias setting I mentioned a few posts back.
WHY. Turn that around for a second. Why should the players be faced with a choice between most everything in the mission being too easy, or coping with a [i]small possibility[/i] of a spawn that they can't defeat and thus cannot complete the mission? I remember a time long ago when I had to call you [i]on the phone[/i] because the damn mission spawned a red Freakshow boss and my build wasn't capable of killing it, especially if it decided to self-rez. Just because the RNGs decided that spawn would be +1 level [i]and[/i] a boss.
if you're worried about horde-killing giving too much reward for the risk, then [b]the rewards themselves (XP, loot, whatever) are out of whack.[/b]
Overpowered spawns are bad for gameplay. Some builds (e.g. trollers, tanks, my dark/dark scrapper) are better with crowds, and some prefer single targets (e.g. my dual blades scrapper).
Further, by allowing players to declare what kinds of spawns they [i]prefer,[/i] the game could determine spawns based on the settings of every member of the team, not just the leader, so you'll get spawns better suited [i]to the team.[/i]
The original difficuly level set by the player. Allow me to spell this out since you missed some context.
The idea is that if you keep kicking a villaing group's ass, they're going to decide to Do Something about you. Say they're "beefing up patrols in places you've been seen." This would be implemented as the game adding a Reputation Modifier to the player-set difficulty level to determine an effective difficulty level. This is in addition to the alertness/aggro mods you suggested already.
So you're annoying them a bit, trashing three of their operations, and they decide to step up patrols on you. Your difficulty level is at 3, but when they spawn it will be effectively difficulty level 4 (Reputation Modifier = +1). You thrash them three times more and they get Really Pissed and spawn at difficulty level 5 (Reputation Modifier = +2). Bosses start showing up, or whatever, and you manage to get your butt kicked. They decide that you're not all that much of a threat any more and knock the Reputation Modifier back down to +1, or even +0 ("Normal").
This can work the other way, too: if they defeat you easily, or more than once, they decide you're not worth the effort and send [i]less[/i] opposition (Reputation Modifier = -1)...
All these Reputation Modifier changes would be between missions.
I'm only bringing it up because the mechanics you're detailing could be used to do the job, without major disruption.
----
For the record, and from memory, the CoH difficulty algorithm would increase the level of the spawns by 1 for every two levels of difficulty, and for the intervening difficuly levels it would increase the number of mobs in each spawn group. So the game already had a less-or-more-mobs setting in it, but it was interleaved with the level offset. On top of that, there was a random chance for each spawn group to be +1 level from normal. So difficulty 0 would get you white and yellow minions, and yellow and orange LTs. If you checked the "bosses" box (added much later to the game), you could get orange or red bosses... the latter "snake-eyes roll" being what led to the Freakshow situation I mentioned earlier.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
[i]Quantity[/i] ... yes. I am however leery of allowing Players to have "too much" control over the "skew" or bias of the ranks (or "quality" if you prefer) of the opposition they'd be facing inside instanced Missions, since that sort of thing leads down the path to Farming (hence my reaction).
I guess then that we're just arguing over [i]degree of control[/i] then. I wouldn't want what you're talking about to be able to introduce a "Large" bias but would be comfortable with a "Small" bias ... something like +/- 10% (or less?) shift in probabilities for Foe NPC Rankings, for example.
Oh yeah ... now that you mention it, I remember that one. Yeah, that was a nasty edge case alright. Did we hit that one before or after the [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Notoriety#Hero_Corps_Field_Analysts]Hero Corps Field Analysts[/url] got introduced?
As for "WHY" ... there's always going to be something of an edge case possibility of an insurmountable roadblock in any system with a range of improbable outcomes like you describe. For reference I offer the Super Reflexes "death knell" of the Double Tap, where it was possible to get hit twice in rapid succession and get faceplanted with "no warning" and no opportunity to respond to avert defeat. It basically happened "often enough" that Super Reflexes actually made a somewhat "unsuitable" aggro magnet for holding the attention of AVs, simply because if you roll the dice enough, a Double Tap [b]will show up[/b] in the results of getting hit twice in succession, and against an AV that was curtains for Super Reflexes (anybody got [i]another[/i] Wakie?). It's why I always dreaded having to aggro magnet an AV with Redlynne, since the Double Tap YOU DIE NOW™ wasn't a matter of *IF* but a matter of *WHEN*, which of course meant *literally* Falling Down On The Job in a way that caused problems for everyone.
So in response, all I can say is that "edge cases happen" ... and don't mind it all that much so long as they are VERY infrequent (ie. long odds).
Again, I'm leery of giving players "too much" control over the bias that would go into this, and from the way your first post was pontificating I feared that was the degree that you were espousing.
Okay, that's a [i]completely different[/i] assumption set from what it appeared like you were saying. This sounds like it could potentially make for an interesting form of Continuous Storytelling in terms of Dynamic Foe Response to the ... persistence ... of the Player in going after specific Foe NPC Groups. You may be onto something, but I'd also want to have a longer look at the basic idea with an eye towards possible refinements because I can easily see this sort of thing turning into a Cascade Of Woe if not handled/managed correctly due to [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Principle]Peter Principle[/url] evolutionary pressures.
True, and I see now what you meant, but I did need the explainer of how you got to here from there.
[url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Notoriety#Hero_Corps_Field_Analysts]Notoriety Settings[/url].
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I don't really see a problem with having a greater degree of player control over spawn composition via some function of the difficulty settings. One could argue it would be abused for farming but let's face facts. That will happen regardless. Someone somewhere will decree that "X map"+"X enemy type"=max xp or loot.
What will also happen if we have a choice, is that folks with heavily biased ST or AOE builds, will be able to enjoy a more tailored mission.
Folks with arguably under performing builds will be able to enjoy a wider variety of content without having to feel gimped somehow. Or, resorting to work arounds like purposely aging a mission to get through it. Something I saw many friends do in the past.
-joe
Repeat Offender
Tank Addict
Homeless.
So this is an anti-farming system now? And I'm just positing that farming is a bad thing for the sake of argument; it's a whole different topic.
But I had the impression this was there to make the game more interesting to players by letting them set how easy or hard things were. But somehow a quality slider would give the players too much control over their fate... whatever.
IMHO the proper range of biases is something to be refined in playtesting. "The only valid test is combat" and all that. For all I know right now, even 10% might be a large bias!
Further, there are ways to implement the bias that do a "diminishing returns" or similar so the map won't be all bosses all the time or all hordes all the time, even if the slider is all the way to one limit.
Before or during. The initial HC stuff was just one slider for increasing difficulty, by making your character "count" as more characters.
Players are still going to want a reasonable way to deal with the edge cases. Resetting the map and hoping for better spawns seems like it would lead to a lot of frustration. Resetting the map, adjusting one or both difficulty sliders, and then knowing you'll at least finish seems like a marginally better outcome.
Because it was moving on to another facet. Player-controlled biases is one facet, because who wants to be a crowd controller who only ever faces one- or two-mob spawns, or a stalker/assassin that always seems to run into monkey hordes; reputation-adjusted difficulty levels is another facet; team-averaged difficulty sliders is yet another facet.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
We don't need to argue. It happened with the [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Unai_Kemen#Go_to_Werewolf_World_and_track_down_Requiem]Puppy[/url] [url=http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Unai_Kemen#Go_to_Werewolf_World_and_fix_the_dimensional_patches]Farms[/url] prior to the introduction of Architect Entertainment (at which point all farming for levels moved into AE and an entire generation of Players never left Atlas Park ever again).
This is where, as a Developer, you need to be cautious about giving the Players "too much control" over what they get to face because as sure as water runs downhill there's going to be pressure put on to finding the path of least resistance for the greatest reward. Yes, this will happen anyway, but the Developers of the game should not be [i]aiding and abetting that effort[/i] on behalf of the Players. This is a "Goldilocks Point" kind of thing where if you give Players "too much control" over the *quality* of opposition they'll face, they'll just reach for the Path of Least Resistance (almost) every time and then skew the conventional wisdom of the game in such a way as to make all other alternatives inferior (or just presumed stupid).
As proof of this dynamic, I offer the "AE Babies" of City of Heroes who spent their entire time going form 1-50 in Architect Entertainment, farming XP in missions that "fit them" and played to the strengths of their build ... who were dramatically incapable of dealing with anything "outside" AE that called for less specialized and more balanced builds in order to be able to handle more diverse sets of opposition than what they had spent "their entire lives" fighting. My innate sense of game balance tells me (more like warns me strenuously!) that giving Players "too much control" over what QUALITY of Foe they get to fight leads to decidedly [b]UN[/b]balanced outcomes, behaviors, strategies and conventional wisdom as a result. That's because I'm one of the people who can look at a "system" (whether it's a game or an organization), find the Weak Point(s) and figure out how to exploit them to maximum effectiveness for personal gain, potentially even "breaking" the system in the process.
I have far less problem with Players being able to affect the QUANTITY of the opposition they'll face ... but having *too much* influence over the QUALITY of opposition you'll be up against opens a whole can of worms that really [i]ought to remain closed[/i]. And Lin is absolutely right that determining "how much is too much" would have to be determined through playtesting, since it would be a "feel" kind of thing as opposed to something that is easily reduced down to a spreadsheet analysis. So as far as I'm concerned, giving Players the ability to affect the QUALITY of Foes is something you'd want to tread *very carefully* on and begin with a presumption of granting "not enough" rather than "too much" because of how the incentive structures play out. You then do a lot of iterative testing to "find the balance point" where the control over Quality granted to Players is in the Goldilocks Zone of "not too much and not too little" so as to not disturb the overall game balance too much.
So I'm not ruling it out completely ... but I am leery of the far reaching implications of allowing Players to control the Quality of their Foes because of the way it can reward and reinforce biases and divides that can ultimately splinter the game's overall balance ... unlike a Quantity control mechanic.
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[img]http://demotivators.despair.com/demotivational/qualitydemotivator.jpg[/img]
Pretty much ANYTHING that impacts on what appears inside Missions, and the rewards they offer, needs to be viewed in a way that asks the question about Farming Potential ... because if the Developers don't, the Players sure will (since the Players have every incentive to do so). This is why I try to be mindful of these factors [i]and anticipate them[/i] (and ways to mitigate them) before letting ideas such as this one loose into the wild.
There's multiple dimensions to "difficulty" in a game like this. I was only addressing the QUANTITY issue with my first post. Allowing Players greater control over the QUANTITY of their opposition is a relatively "safe" thing to hand to Player control, so long as the QUALITY of the opposition that comes in those quantities is sufficiently randomized (and therefore, "balanced"). Offering too much influence over QUALITY of opposition innately disturbs the "balance" of the game that Players would need to build (and prepare) for in a way that is quantitatively different from a QUANTITY control, and I fear (yes, fear!) that giving Players *too much* control over the QUALITY of opposition could undermine the game's balance in very fundamental ways, hence my resistance and caution to the notion of allowing it.
Oh I totally agree with you on that. I just want to be biased towards caution rather than towards going whole hog and "who cares?" what it does.
I would point out that with the system I presented in my Original Post, Bosses simply can't be spawned in 1 Player Missions until reaching x2 Difficulty (6 Minion Budget) or higher, or in 2+ Player Missions (7 Minion Budget minimum) ... so if you're looking for a way to avoid an "unwanted Boss" situation, the system I've designed already has it built in from the get-go. I'm operating from the assumption that adjusting the Difficulty setting would automatically reset the Mission so as to respawn everything upon re-entry, so ... solution already provided for?
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Well, it's hard to say. I'm assuming your proposal has all spawns at player level. Of course, this presupposes a "modifiers due to level difference" system in the combat calculations. The problem with CoX was how they got free promotions at random; in your system, a mob getting +1 level should cost some minion points.
BTW, adjusting difficulty settings should simply have no effect until the next mission, or an explicit mission reset.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
I very specifically left the Level Differentials aspect completely outside of the Quantity question that I was addressing.
Heck, I'm already looking at the possibility of having "level-less" Foe NPCs so that you don't have zones and regions of the game obsoleting themselves just because their Level doesn't match your character's. Or to put an even finer point on things ... Levels for the PCs, okay ... Levels for the NPCs, why bother?
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Level free npcs have a certain attraction. But there is one other consideration.
A great deal of the player's attention is on the strength of their character vs the mission at hand. Some will try to maximize risk/reward. But not all.
A great many of my friends purposely set out to increase the challenge they faced. Either way there was ways to adjust.
Spawn sIze
Strength of foe class vs your own strengths and weaknesses
Foe level
The first is addressed by your suggestions, the second is inevitable, if we remove the third.....well, it may be worth considering increasing the flexibility of one or both of the remaining variables to compensate.
-joe
Repeat Offender
Tank Addict
Homeless.
No caps on aggro limit please.
Have a difficulty slider that goes higher than +4X8
We have already had quite a little discussion over aggro caps here http://cityoftitans.com/forum/aggro-and-aoe-caps
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Tank Addict
Homeless.
I wonder if we will have an explicit mission difficulty reset button if we find that we've bitten off more than we can chew?
Depends on what you mean by that. Speaking just for myself, I'd want any kind of Mission Difficulty control to be accessed through the Menu Options rather than by needing to visit an NPC ... thereby making the adjustment of Mission Difficulty relatively "location agnostic" so to speak.
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Agreed!
Though I said that about the tailor and Auction House too >_>
I'd argue that making tailoring services something Location Specific has its side benefits. For me, going into ICON allowed me to survey not only the current state of the Fashion Disasters that roamed the city, but also to sometimes see inspiring choices that had been made which I could then turn around and make use of myself in my own costumes. More than one of the costume tricks I picked up over the years was due to seeing a particular combination on someone else's character so as to become inspired myself ... and one of the better places to get those inspirations (aside from costume contests) was inside ICON.
The Auction House makes sense to make that Location Specific too, because when people are dealing with the Auction House, they're "playing the menus" rather than "playing the game" or at least aren't all that interested in the game environment at that time. So in that sense I'd rather people "go somewhere" to stand around and not participate in the zone than be doing that kind of activity anywhere and everywhere. I know that there were times when I could spend upwards of 20 minutes at a time in the Auction House scouring through menus trying to find stuff, and I wouldn't want to "encourage" that kind of useless loitering on the streets and back alleyways.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
In every game, there are places where people go and just hangout. Can get that same ICON look at others costumes, that way.
AH is easily able to "remove" the player from the game or the player can go to any place they want if they think their in some place unsafe or to cluttered.
Whether it be an actual AH, Icon, or field analyst or a menu option is a QoL feature..
Id rather have whatever is easiest for dev programming so CoT can get here faster.
Seems you've created yet another fascinating system with far reaching and not entirely known consequences, Redlynne. Can't say I'm surprised, really. I hope it makes it into the game itself.
Couple of questions for it, though, and I think I'll number them for easy reference/answering.
1. Is the plan for this system to provide for hostiles in instance zones only, or would it work for non-instances?
2. If the plan is for the system to supply hostiles in global maps (non-instance) as well, would it calculate the number of people in the map instead of the number of people in a team? Because otherwise I see no AVs or GMs cropping up. And I like my AVs and GMs.
3. Is player class a variable worth including in the formula, or would it make more sense to treat everybody as a 1.0 in terms of ability to dispatch opponents in the end?
All in all, I like it. Seems like a good system, most definitely something I can have fun with. Personally, I like hordes of zerglings.
Rise! From the ashes and decay!
Rise! From the prison of your grave!
Rise! Upon the standard at the door!
Rise! Into the eye of the Storm!
-KMFDM, "Risen"
/em shrugs
Bad habit of mine, I know. I'll stop doing this sort of thing someday ... maybe ...
The INITIAL idea is that it would provide a benchmark for instances, and in point of fact it would only "need" to be used for instances, really.
That said, something that I've thought about as something of an alternative point of interest ... is exactly "how" this sort of scaling metric could be applied to World PvE, which is something of a trickier question. One notion I've got is that if a Team, through combination of its Players and Difficulty setting, effectively "demands" a Minion Budget higher than the Minion Budget of a "Spawn Group on the Street" that is already spawned ... should anything happen to "correct" that disparity?
This would, of course, be optional, but I'm thinking it would be interesting if ... when a Spawn Group is attacked by a Team (which could be as small as 1 Player) and the Minion Budget of the Spawn Group already in place is BELOW what the number of Players in the Team and the Difficulty setting for that Team "demands" ... that the "deficit" in the Minion Budget be made up with what amounts to "extra Foe NPCs" spawning out of any nearby Door until the Minion Budget requirement is met.
So let's take the most extreme examples just for purposes of illustration of what I'm talking about.
The Foe NPC Spawn Groups in the [b]{insert name}[/b] Neighborhood have, by default, a Minion Budget of 3 Minions ... meaning that you'll usually see Spawn Groups of either 3 Minions -or- 1 Lieutenant and 1 Minion at the Spawn Points in the Neighborhood.
A Team of 8 Players is street sweeping, and ONE of the members of the Team 8 "taps" one of the Minions in this Spawn Group.
The Minion Budget as determined by the Neighborhood Environment is 3 ... but as determined by the Team Size and Difficulty ought to be 31 (because 8 Players). That's a differential of 31-3=28 Minions.
So what happens is that after the someone on the Team 8 "taps" one of the Minions, the Minion Budget for the Spawn Group gets increased from 3 up to 31 ... and the remaining 28 Minion Budget comes pouring out of any (and all?) nearby Doors to come join the fray. It's not so much an "ambush" situation as more like a call goes out for Reinforcements, and the extras arrive in a way that's substantially consistent with "crawling out of the woodwork" (so to speak) by pouring out of nearby Doors (in a Trick or Treat results in Trick style).
Note that this sort of thing would only make small Minion Budgets "larger" for Teams, so as to give Teams some kind of challenge when street sweeping, but the reverse would not be true ... so a soloist "tapping" a Spawn Group with a really high Minion Budget out on the streets wouldn't see a bunch of the Foe NPCs "run away" to disappear through nearby doors in order to adjust the Minion Budget of the Spawn Group DOWN to match the "demand" of the Team's Minion Budget. So this would be a rather One Way phenomenon in terms of adjusting.
If the Spawn Group has the Threat Table(s) of its members reset to zero ... either through use of Placate effects or simple "leashing" of the Foe NPCs when the Player(s) run away ... but essentially if the Spawn Group "resets" to an out of combat state, the "extras" that would have spawned due to the Team Size Scaling rule would go back to the Doors they came out of and despawn. You'd want to do this to prevent Griefing in the form of a Team 8 of obnoxious people going around and "tapping" every Spawn Group in the zone so that they all spawn really huge Minion Budgets, which then never drop back down again and partially/mostly despawn after the original Team 8 drops aggro. Just think of how unfair to Newbies it would be if Atlas Park had every Spawn Group spawning Foe NPCs in quantities twice as profuse as The Hollows ... and they "stuck around" until defeated by SOMEBODY. Not good, and most definitely Not Fair.
Anyway, it's just an idea of how to [i]extend[/i] the Minion Budget idea into the wider persistent PvE World. Not necessarily recommending that extension, but if it were done, this is how I'd want to apply the principles of it.
Teams only. Arch-villains/Heroes, Monsters and Giant Monsters ought to be [b]EVENTS[/b] rather than something that can just randomly happen on any old street corner (Story Arcs involving the [url=http://youtu.be/1-OfCjD5qvE?t=5m56s]Telephone Pole Group[/url] notwithstanding). ^_-
1 Player = 1 Player. Choices of powersets do not factor into that computation.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
This made me think about how things might be affected by the "rep" discussion and standing with various types of enemy groups. How many, and how soon they arrive, could be factored in here, as well. But something else occurred to me...
What if the PC/PC team level EXCEEDS the mob minion budget by a very large amount, and they just RUN AWAY IN TERROR! Down alleys, back into doors, down manholes...that would address the gigantic mob creation problems, plus be hysterical.
It could also have a 'morale' factor thrown in; CoH had mechanics that would have mobs try to run if they were getting pounded too hard, and a version of this could be implemented that would affect how NPCs react if presented with overwhelming force. If a PC or team came into aggro range, and the first attack from the PC(s) one-shots one or more NPCs in the spawn, it could cause the rest of the spawn to panic and run, or to surrender. Different NPC groups would have different levels of morale -- using CoH for an example, Hellions or Skulls would break fairly easily, Nemesis or Malta would be very hard to break, and some, like the Clockwork, wouldn't break at all (the individual Clockwork just being extensions of the Clockwork King's will). This could happen only at the start of a fight, or the 'run/surrender' check could be made every time a mob in the spawn gets defeaeted.
This can have several different aspects that affect fights -- mobs that run could run to the nearest un-aggro'd spawn and trigger their aggro, for example, so runners could pull in mobs from deeper in a mission, and mezzing runners could become important in missions. Mobs that surrender would assume a readily-identifiable pose and go neutral, and there could be a character-by-character power setting that controls whether AoE powers affect surrendered mobs (for the 'You surrendered; die anyway' crowd, although you wouldn't get a second XP/loot drop from a mob defeated after they surrender, and they'd turn hostile again if you attacked them after they surrendered and wouldn't check for run/surrender again.
Clockworks would attack even if they were grossly outclassed. Annoying!
Be Well!
Fireheart
Not my call, but I would not be surprised if there are at least a few enemies in the game that are too mindless/fearless to know when they are outclassed.
______________
IANAL, IMHO, WYSIWYG, YMMV, IIRC, AFAIK, ETC
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I'd be disappointed if there weren't a few: various mindless undead, non-sapient robots (including the aforementioned clockworks?), allegedly sapient extremists on suicide missions...
Foradain, Mage of Phoenix Rising.
[url=https://cityoftitans.com/forum/foradains-character-conclave]Foradain's Character Conclave[/url]
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To be fair, you really want Foe NPC Groups to basically run the gamut ... from Murlock-class cowards who run away "a lot" (or all too easily for Player comfort) to what functionally amounts to "fanatics" who NEVER run away. This fanaticism can be "excused" for all sorts of reasons including fervent belief systems (ie. the historical reason), brainwashing or other mind control, and of course everyone's favorite, lowest bidder programming (for bioroids, robots and AIs) that simply omits an imperative for self-preservation.
You can even potentially vary things up within a particular Foe NPC Group. So for instance the Mek Men of the 5th Column/Council could be programmed as fanatical fighters that never run away (because they're robots) while the human soldiers might if their morale is broken (although this is unlikely since they have "good" morale in the presence of Leaders). As already mentioned, Clockworks, being simply extensions of The Clockwork King's will, would all be "fanatical" fighters that will fight to destruction. Among the Sky Raiders, the Porters alone would be highly prone to "running" (by Teleporting) so as to communicate Aggro to additional Spawn Groups, making them VERY annoying to have to deal with. Among the Carnival of Shadows, the Strongmen are the expendable cannon fodder, so they fight fanatically, while the women exhibit more of a sense of self preservation, with the Illusionists and Master Illusionists being the most prone to running.
This doesn't have to be a One Size Fits All deal. It could be defined at the Foe NPC Type level as yet another parameter that governs their disposition and behavior.
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