Variable Difficulty Interface (A Poll).

[whenwizardswar]

In light of many conversations latelyy, a discussion among the staff has arisen about hunting areas and the risk DMs face sometimes when trying to spice up our ordinary day to day monster hunting. As DMs we risk either failing to make the boosted hunt boring, and not a challenge, or we run the risk of accidently cranking things up to much and smearing our players all over the tunnels down which they creep.

I got to thinking about something I have seen on other servers, and I decided to poll you all, as a whole to see how you all feel about something.

THIS IN BY NO MEANS A TEASER OF ANYTHING WE ARE PLANNING, THIS IS JUST A MEASURE OF COMMUNITY INTEREST IN SOMETTHING IN THE THEORY CRAFTING MINDSET

How it would work, is this.

Your PC is level X and you want to hunt alone, so you head to an area you want to hunt in, but your afraid of being overwhelmed and unable to handle the spawns in your area of choice. In your inventory would be a widgit which you activate, which tells the area and or server that your alone, and want to steal shinies but you need the critters to play nice with you. This wand funciton, causes smaller AND OR weaker versions of local monsters to spawn so you can get an appropriae challenege for being on yyour own. The cost of this, would be less XP and less monster drops since-less monsters spawning obviously. This mode would ONLY be available to someone who is on their own.

There would be a second "standard" option which would set area difficulty to normal, and would be aimed at partys of 2-3 or four people.

A third potential option would essentially be PARTYY MODE and would ONLY be accessable if your in a party of 4+ people and would cause increased spawn sizes/rates, tougher monsters, and the chance for those rare and powerful spawns to occasionally appear to harass the party. This mode would not be taken lightly, and everone in the partty would have to toggle this mode on ttheir own wand for it to take effect AND this mode would ONLY be allowed for groups of 4+ players, so you wont see solo pcs with perfect builds soloing this difficulty.

Thats about the gist of it, the bare bones concept. Remember, this is not saying we are working on it, I ask this poll just to gauge community interest, nothing more nothing less.

[TheImpregnableDerp]

This is not a single player game, so I don't see how it makes sense for us to be able to adjust the difficulty for ourselves. If someone goes to the abyss, they should expect a pretty tough challenge. I don't see why all the tougher demons would go hide just so a lone adventurer can pick on their little brothers.

The one aspect of this I do find interesting is the ability to make things more difficult, for the sake of adventuring in parties. The Borderlands games scale enemies to be stronger and spawn in greater number when you play co-op multiplayer with friends. The more friends in your game, the more enemies spawn, the stronger they are, and the better loot they drop. But this is an automatic thing though, you can't just go into the menu and adjust it. (though there are separate difficulty options besides that) Still, I think it would be an interesting option that might make farming in parties more worth it, since currently the more people you bring, the more ways you have to split the gold/items, which means less for everyone. Right now the meta is to find the hardest dungeon you can solo and just do that over and over again. I think it would be nice if I could take three other people to do fire giants or abyss and still make the same amount of gold or more as doing it solo. I don't want to see PC's with trash builds start bragging about how they solo'd the abyss though, so am somewhat against making things easier.

[The Gentleman]

something like this would allow players of vastly different levels of experiance to play and enjoy the hunt/loot system to a varying degree of reward and i know that as the server is now, with it being a more social roleplay style, providing this would be a boon for social groups.

[solariuk]

Hrm I'm not sure about this... cranking up for a challenge is fun sometimes - but going in the other direction, taking the fear and dread out of a place is not something I like the idea of to be honest.

Nothing like an epic fight and escaping by the skin of your teeth rather than cutting through them like butter

Maybe splintered-off solo-able areas with less dense spawns would work too.