Tobold wrote a very insightful post. He told that the optimal chance of win should be around 50% for several reasons: you never face with being hopelessly destroyed, nor with "grind": a streak of meaningless victories over hopeless opponents. Also, your personal contribution matters the most in an even match, while in a faceroll or a hopeless battle you being AFK would not make any difference.
However after declaring that "50% win chance is fun" he recognizes that "a perfectly balanced 50:50 win:loss PvE mob in fact has the skilled players still win all of the time, and the less skilled lose all of the time", which makes it impossible.
So we bumped into the "fun-trap" of player separation. To create the "50%-opponent", we must create a homogenous group of players, where the group-average is approximately equal to the individual-average. It is considered "common sense" that player separation is "not fun", as it separates friends (or rather "friends") from each other and also stigmatize some of the separated groups, acting as discrimination. It can be told without doubt that there isn't any AAA MMO that has a strong PvE separation of players, and most games actually make effort to let the worse possible players to complete content.
So we have a fun vs fun situation: if we don't separate players, they don't have fun because the content is either too easy or too hard, if we separate them, they don't have fun because they can't play with "friends" and others mock them for being officially scrubs or no-lifers.
Now let me offer a solution to this problem. Funnily it's not mine at all, it's Blizzard's own, used in arenas and rated BGs. You are separated according to your MMR. A 2000 MMR team is completely separated from an 1000MMR team, assuming the system works. They both get 50% win rate and they both get the same reward: conquest points. The MMR is invisible so you can't tell if the guy next to you in Stormwind is 2500 or 700 rated, nor anyone can tell it about you, no stigmatization. Visible "rating" increases over time, so 800 rating can mean a new player who won 12 matches in a row, or someone who couldn't climb higher since January. Low rating doesn't bar you from rewards, as you both get the same: conquest points. It's true that the 2500 guy gets more, but at the end, everyone will be full vicious. Socially everyone is equal, game-wise people are separated.
How could it be applied to PvE:
PS: Like every content on this blog, this idea is also completely free, any gaming company can implement it for free.
Answer to the most common comments: the "VP only" loot system is not inherent. The bosses can still have loot tables, and their chance to drop varies with group MMR. A 500 rating boss have 50% chance to drop an epic, a 2500 rating boss has 400% (4 loot).
The 50/50 is also variable to any ratio desired by point changes. If killing gives 50 rating and wiping takes 10, than the kill:wipe ratio will be 1:5
However after declaring that "50% win chance is fun" he recognizes that "a perfectly balanced 50:50 win:loss PvE mob in fact has the skilled players still win all of the time, and the less skilled lose all of the time", which makes it impossible.
So we bumped into the "fun-trap" of player separation. To create the "50%-opponent", we must create a homogenous group of players, where the group-average is approximately equal to the individual-average. It is considered "common sense" that player separation is "not fun", as it separates friends (or rather "friends") from each other and also stigmatize some of the separated groups, acting as discrimination. It can be told without doubt that there isn't any AAA MMO that has a strong PvE separation of players, and most games actually make effort to let the worse possible players to complete content.
So we have a fun vs fun situation: if we don't separate players, they don't have fun because the content is either too easy or too hard, if we separate them, they don't have fun because they can't play with "friends" and others mock them for being officially scrubs or no-lifers.
Now let me offer a solution to this problem. Funnily it's not mine at all, it's Blizzard's own, used in arenas and rated BGs. You are separated according to your MMR. A 2000 MMR team is completely separated from an 1000MMR team, assuming the system works. They both get 50% win rate and they both get the same reward: conquest points. The MMR is invisible so you can't tell if the guy next to you in Stormwind is 2500 or 700 rated, nor anyone can tell it about you, no stigmatization. Visible "rating" increases over time, so 800 rating can mean a new player who won 12 matches in a row, or someone who couldn't climb higher since January. Low rating doesn't bar you from rewards, as you both get the same: conquest points. It's true that the 2500 guy gets more, but at the end, everyone will be full vicious. Socially everyone is equal, game-wise people are separated.
How could it be applied to PvE:
- Boss difficulty is decided on the fly based on the team's PvE rating.
- Your rating goes up by defeating a boss, your rating goes down by wiping on him.
- There is no need for "hard modes", as the bosses are automatically tuned. Actually there is no need for any kind of tuning, the boss can't be "too hard" or "too easy", as the proper difficulty will be adjusted after a few wipes or faceroll-kills.
- The boss drops no loot, you are awarded valor points for the kill. This is the only source of raider gear.
- The boss drops valor points based on your rating. While both the worst and the best players are equally 12/12, the former get much less points every week than top rated teams. (You can't kill more than 12 bosses due to the lockout).
- This system makes firstkills (depending on intensive playing, "no life") meaningless, and places PvE rating the measure of being top. Playing more would not give any inherent advantages besides more experience as you can't wipe 100x on the boss as every wipe decreases your rating, therefore the difficulty of the fight.
- This would prevent good players running out of content. If you facerolled a new instance in the first week, next week the "same" place would be considerably harder, due to your elevated rating. Soon you reach the point where you are 50-50. There is always a chance to elevate your rating by getting skill and gear. The competition of guilds would intensify over time, instead of ending when the first guild clears all HMs.
PS: Like every content on this blog, this idea is also completely free, any gaming company can implement it for free.
Answer to the most common comments: the "VP only" loot system is not inherent. The bosses can still have loot tables, and their chance to drop varies with group MMR. A 500 rating boss have 50% chance to drop an epic, a 2500 rating boss has 400% (4 loot).
The 50/50 is also variable to any ratio desired by point changes. If killing gives 50 rating and wiping takes 10, than the kill:wipe ratio will be 1:5
37 comments:
Great idea, think it would work really well, but I can't help but nitpick a few problems with it.
-might lead to repeated, deliberate wiping, probably by hunters aggroing then feigning to reduce the boss down to an easier level, so a bottom limit would be needed
-reducing the difficulty wouldn't be very simple on some fights, such as ones with instant death mechanics.
-would make wipes alot more feared than before, so guilds might be more stubborn on making sure all CDs and buffs are up. Then again, might make wipes less feared since the boss will be easier next time
Still, I like the idea, surprised no one else has thought of it. :)
Interesting idea, however making a boss scale is not as simple as it looks like. You can make the boss hit less harder, give him less hp, but that is usually not the problem for bad players: they simply wipe to mechanics like dodging fire and standing in goo.
Also if bosses scale, we as a hard mode guild would need to clear the first boss every lockout in a harder and harder mode before we reach a new boss, unless we wipe deliberately to decrease our mmr. This feels like tetris to me where the objects drop faster and faster.
Removing loot tables is not something I fancy either. The luck and frustration of item x dropping or not adds to the raiding atmosphere. It would also mean that people upgrade in a very linear way: first the best items, then the 2nd best. And the least upgrade is kept till the end. Now it's more or less the other way around: you can only unlock 4p set bonus if you clear an end boss. Loot distribution is more balanced with the current system.
And alternative could be that the stats on your loot scale with your pve rating.
Like with all of Blizzard's MMR ratings, someone who is a top player will never be able to experience the HM-tuned equivalent boss, because they will never play enough to get their MMR to the HM level, even if they have straight wins, simply because running a dungeon boss (noting that your PvE ratings will probably start from dungeon -> raid) once a week isn't going to get you a high enough MMR rating to proceed onto heroic level content, even if you never wipe. Otherwise, it's too easy to progress from wiping to heroics.
Also, they still can't play with friends.
I second one of Assara's comments. How do you stop people from wiping several times on purpose to lower difficulty?
A possible fix would maybe be after 3 wipes, difficulty no longer goes down. Something along those lines.
What about the high end limit? If there's none - 85s will start wiping on Hogger in The Stockade; if there is - it might not be challenging for top players after some time.
This means the randomness of loot drops is out of question. The first thing a healer does with VP is buy something overpowered such as Shard of Woe. After that, all content gets nerfed by gear and it becomes farm.
I dont see the problem of seperating different quality of players. The friends can boost each other later in PUGs. Perhaps PvE raiding is not designed to be played among friends since that leads to social playing; the opposite of your guilds goal.
Deliberate wiping is no issue either. Resetting Maloriak equals wipe. A person who causes too many wipes shall be replaced, or next time not invited.
You are very close to the answer, but didn't quite get it.
The more complete solution is PvE arena. Just like arena, players will form teams of 3, 5, or whatever size brackets you make. They enter the queue, and are instantly matched up against a boss encounter based on their rating. As with arena, eventually the wins and losses will balance out their rating.
I do not enjoy farming raid content. Farming heroic dungeon content is bad enough, but at least there is an easy way to form groups via the LFD tool. What you would be liable to see in such an ELO system are people clearing the content quickly and then going back to whatever else they were doing and/or unsubbing. Grinding gear for the sake of having gear works in Diablo-esque games (and I enjoyed Diablo quite a bit), but Diablo did not require X number of people to be online simultaneously before you could even play the level you wanted.
When you look at the hardmode participation, I think you can see how little of a market there is for being challenged for the sake of challenge, e.g. same boss, +20% damage or extra abilities. I mean, in how many of your single-player games do you beat it, then immediately play again on the next difficulty up?
This is all besides the fact that gear largely becomes pointless in such a model. Why get gear at all when it does not increase likelihood of success? The win percentage of someone in greens is the exact same as that person in 4pc T11. Nevermind how playing poorly one day leads to the same 50% win percentage as being the top of your game. The 50/50 model "works" in PvP because people rarely tolerate losing for long periods of time in PvP scenarios. Players endure the 5/95 PvE model because they only have to win once, and/or the odds improve each subsequent time they do win.
I could be wrong, but aren't there a few games with AI Directors that actively try to do this, like the Left 4 Dead series? It's a bit easier with "trash" than bosses because you just keep increasing the frequency of tougher mob spawns and mob behaviour. It'd be harder to do with heavily scripted "boss" encounters and multiple roles (like bad DPS, but good tank, how do you rate the group?)
Anyway, I agree it's a good idea, and I do think it has been applied in some other genres.
Post-script: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_4_Dead#AI_Director
An interesting and quite novel idea in my opinion.
My only doubt - in most cases the boss difficulty (depending on rating) would mean more hp and/or damage, and this would either reveal the rating system altogether (meaning the ratings wouldn't be hidden anymore) or cause a drop of interest in the longer run (how much more hp can a boss get before it gets silly?).
Worst idea ever. If I killed a boss, I don't want it to be harder next time. The main fun is the first killing, and after people want some gear from it. Not wiping again on the same boss next week, because it goes harder. It's repetitive to kill the same boss every week, but it's frustrating to wipe on the same boss every week.
The "no gear just point" system solves some problem with the present drop system, but it will only make good groups and people to stop raiding and cancel their account, cause they can farm their gear fast (no random = there isn't any reason to kill the bosses after you killed them X times).
The other problem is that people (mainly social/casual player) love to faceroll content. They want to see the bosses just go down easily, get some shiny epic. They don't want to wipe on any bosses.
This means one M&S pug can drag down your rating much lower than the rest of your guild's.
So, I suggest you are able to turn an invisible to other players setting on/off. Progression Raiding would be the name of the feature, having this off stops you losing or gaining MMR, but you still gain valour.
"reducing the difficulty wouldn't be very simple on some fights, such as ones with instant death mechanics.' A longer cooldown on those instant death mechanics would solve that problem.
Oh, just edit this into my last post please. I just read what Tobold said. He was referring to the regular balancing we have now when he said bad players always lose, and good players always win.
will always kill Chimaeron 10m normal.
won't.
Booooooooring.
No not the post - the game that would implement this.
People generally raid for 2 reasons - loot and/or bosskills. If you take away the random loot, that takes away all the excitement from people who want loot as all they are left with is grinding points (like we don't have enough points to grind in WoW...).
Lootwhores aside, this means that pretty much everyone can faceroll everything. Raiding for kills is dead because everyone kills everything in first week, just by wiping until the boss becomes easy enough for faceroll.
So all we are left with is your suggested raiding for rating. I suppose there are people who might find that fun, but essentially its like fighting for highscores in Rock Band or smth (I dunno if there are highscores in Rock Band), as you are basically just trying to go through the same motions with fewer errors. There is no achievable goal (a number can always get higher), no carrot dangling ahead.
Currently, downing a new boss can sometimes mean an explosion of cheers in Ventrilo. That dps who grabbed the boss and kited him across the room after tank died, giving everyone the necessary 3 seconds to finish him, gets to feel like a hero. The dude who gets the 3% droprate trinket comes in his pants.
All of that replaced with "+20 rating, +50 valor points" and a "good job guys, maybe next week, when we kill everything for 25th time, we can get 10 more rating so we hit 2200"?
And I didn't pull that 25th time out of my ass - that's roughly how many kills of everything we'd have by now if the system was implemented in Cata Tier 1. That's how horribly grindy that would be.
This would eliminate a lot of "replay value" by having vendor bought items.
A lot of people keep raiding because they want a particular item from a boss, a gearing system similar to pvp is steady and can be planned. People won't need to stick to killing a particular boss for months in the hope of dropping a particular item.
I remember farming for weeks (with the 3.2 relevant badges rotting in my bags) kologarn in order to obtain my ironmender (bis offhand for resto druids), which I never got due to bad luck.
Trinkets during wotlk weren't easy to come by and some of them were prestige item (breaking entire specs in case of the armor penetration ones).
This system is open to exploitations and/or big flaws:
- leave the rating dynamic and people will wipe on purpose (lose 10 matches a week anyone?) until they can kill the boss with their terrible pug
- change the rating week by week and raiders will be faced to a boss rating that they can't overcome and will stay for the entire week without clearing content and getting rewards, there's a reason if arena isn't widespread popular... people hate to be confronted with their failures.
One problem with this idea in PvE: what is your 'equilibrium point'? In PvP it is, obviously, 50/50.
Is it desirable for it to be 50/50 in PvE too? (Note: this would mean most guilds killed Nef early on the second night of raiding, after 12 wipes and 11 kills of the other bosses).
Depending on the ratio you choose, you will make some raiders happy and others unhappy. Also, gear progression becomes meaningless in this system.
Not a good idea, especially considering how poor the current hard mode implementation is. (HPs tuned up, damage brutally tuned up, 1-2 extra abilities or adds added, done) We would not lose a bit of enjoyment, actually we would gain by facing a challenge we can defeat but not without thought.
Gevlon
Shame on you. You're constantly talking down on Blizzard choosing to reward failure, especially in PVP content, and that's -exactly- what your current plan rewards, is failure.
Great groups choose to be great and invest the ammount of time and effort that they do so that they can advance through content, the "fun" is in "overcoming the challenge", you can't overcome something that gets stronger every time you beat it, and a simple numeric change to the content is stupid. It doesn't feel any better beating a boss that does 105% of its normal damage per swing this week. Instead you create an atmosphere where losing is no fun and winning is also no fun.
You are starting to think like an idiotic social. You seem the believe that everyone raids to get gear to show off to their friends, and that everyone joins progression raiding guilds so that they can look uber-leet on the leader boards.
You're missing the point. The vast majority of the raiders raid because "raiding is fun" and the fun inherrent to raiding is in overcoming a challenge.
What you're presenting is the choice of replacing marathons with treadmills, because then no one could ever complain that the marathon was too short or the hill wasn't steep enough.
Which is stupid when you consider that a large portion of the people run the marathons seeking to overcome the challenge they present, a treadmill isn't a challenge, its a pointless grind to infinity.
@Assara
What you say about deliberate wipes, came to my mind too, but there's a solution for it: the difficulity of an encounter is fixed for a raid lockout. This means, the boss will only adjust to your lesser PvE rating only next week, not this one. This would make deliberat wipes on a long run meeningless, because this would result in halved Valor Points: you don't get any this week, 'cause you spent your time wiping on a boss, not killing it, you don't gain any Valor Points, next week, when the difficulity is adjusted to the new PvE rating, you will get not as much Valor Points as you would get on a harder one. Say, you would get 50 VP for for a harder boss kill and 40 for an easier. By wiping on the harder and than killing the easier, you get your 40VP for two weeks lockout: making the boss worth 20VP a week. Does this make sence? I don't think so.
Instant death mechanics are not too common to cause a real problem with the difficulity. Think about this: if the boss hits for 10k on a 200k HP tank, with an enrage time of 20minutes, 20M HP and an average DD doing on him 20k DPS. Who would care about instant death mechanics on such a boss?
I see no problems with deliberate wiping: If you prefer easy content with little rewards, have your fun.
I deliberately wipe in arena because I can't bother to play it seriously. I'm paying the price of having only 1340 CP/week.
@Gevlon: I think you stumbled on a very good idea. The principles are also in line with a commercial approach to keep the most costumers happy.
@all the naysayers:
1 - The implementation cynic - Boss scaling can be done. Nerfing bosses and buffing people worked on ICC. Get over it.
2 - The hard-core-player poser - The rankings would work. PVE rankings would be epeen enough to show off in sites and would work to attract similar players. If you can't handle your raids getting more difficult two things will show: a) you are not THAT l33t; b)the ranking will stabilize on your skill level. Get over it.
3 - The people who can't read posts - People can't play with their friends? PVE would be a median between raiders. Sort your groups. Sort your guilds. If you want higher counts of Valor Points don't bring lesser players to the fight. If you have moronic friends and want to play with them roll an alt or suck it up. Aren't you playing for "fun"?
4 - The elitist - For you there is something called Hard Modes. And hard mode mounts for you to show in cities. Achievements that can't be done because that content will not be nerfed. Eternal lasting podium seats. Most hard core guilds would love to ditch the drama prone system of random loot to a steady income of VP that could be used to buy all the gear. Give me a legendary item quest-chain any day instead of that elusive 2% drop on a boss.
Long live the socialist Gevlon! We might have a future world leader here, people. /grin
"WoW is a game of constant inflation" remember?
If I learned something about PvE in WoW it is the fact the boss is important only once and it is "now". After "now" its just something to complete for some silly achievement. The difference between PvE and PvP is the PvE encounter has strict rules. There is no way around them. There is not a possibility to wait for a weaker opponents. This is what PvE progress is about.
I don't doubt this auto adjusting idea would be technically implementable but for me it would mean end of the progress. And without progress there is no reason for PvE.
Why should I complete some PvE epic set when I can't say "we did it!". Who would play such PvE? Only socials. And why did Blizzard left the WotLK raid model where raids were easy a pugable? Because they need the core raiders. They need the elitists jerks. Without them the PvE is like social club.
For me as a PvE raider there is no success ratio. Either I did it or not. Either I earned dragonslayer title before patch 4.2 or not. I do not flex with the title. Its just about the simple sentence "we did it". Silly, is it? Yes its a silly game.
Gevlon, I think this is an excellent idea and a feature I'd love to see in games, but I do worry about the implementation of boss scaling.
Having a boss simply hit harder or faster as you get better, so you have to faster on heals, quicker on interrupts, does not make for a very interesting encounter. That just sounds tedious, like never being able to get your balance.
Raiding is not like pvp, all chaotic and twitch. Raiding is more like an elaborately choreographed dance or a complex symphony, where you learn to play your part. You first learn to play it at all, then you learn to play it well, with grace.
For me, and for several other players I'm sure, the fun of raiding is not killing all the bosses and getting loot, but rather its from working on a boss for 2-3 hours and _learning_, figuring out how to deal with mechanics with your group composition. My favorite encounter in current content is easily heroic omnitron, with so many different combinations of abilities that need to be considered and planned for.
I think you're missing the idea that the 'fun' part of raiding isn't from the gear, it's from wiping at the edge of your progression. The loot from farm bosses is just a scheme to keep us interested in stuff we've already beat, not a reward in itself.
Also there is no reason you can't have rating requirements on specific pieces of gear to further incentive raising one's rating.
Interesting idea.
I especially like loot tied to rating. ilvl of loot could depend on your rating and could be quite flexible: 359 at 1500, 372 at 2000+, 346 at 1000 and below and everything in-between. Some loot could also drop only above certain rating, like weapons can drop at 1600+, trinkets at 1800+ and that super-elite ilvl 379 item is only added to the loot table at 2200.
The rating itself is a bit of a problem, though - the system needs to discourage tanking to superlow levels and at the same time accommodate hardcore raiders, letting them access HM content fast.
I can think of a system, but it's not particularly elegant:
- You gain a base of 40 points per kill and lose 20 for a wipe
- At the end of the instance you get "bonus" rating if you cleared it. The amount of bonus is highly nonlinear and is based on the total number of wipes. If wipes are more than 2x Kills, you gain no bonus. If you had 0 wipes, you gain a huge amount of bonus. So if a group starts at 1500 and clears BoT with 8 wipes, they stay at 1500. If it clears BoT with 0 wipes, it gains 160 points + say, 300 bonus, so it jumps to 1960 (lets consider 2000 HM content, since 2000+ is 372 gear)
- To discourage rating tanking, you can only lose 60 points per boss BELOW 1500. So if first week you walk in with 1500, wipe on halfus whole night and leave, you'll only be at 1440. On the other hand, if you 1shot everything first week and come back the next and you're unable to handle halfus at anywhere near 1960, you can easily tank it to 1700. If you clear the whole instance at 1700 this week, you won't get any bonus because you pulled halfus 13 times to get there.
So average players will not get much bonus and progress slowly, bad players will tank their rating slowly until they can kill bosses at 1200 and get ilvl 350 loot and top guilds will get to 2200+ in only a couple weeks where they will be challenged.
For all the people that hate the VP grind: you could have tiered loot tables: 800 raiting drops pants of the , and 2000 rating drops tier helmets.
Part of the fun for me is to try new fights. With this system you'll see the "whole" content in a couple of weeks. Surely it will be a watered-down version of the fights, but do I feel like grinding my rating just to see Nefarion hit harder? Would I enjoy that each time I go to BWD Magmaw will chew my tank harder and harder? Very unlikely tbh.
Do you really think the "every time you succeed it gets harder" concept would fly?
The whole design concept of MMORPG's is that you gain levels, power and better gear and content becomes easier for you.
Who would play a game that made you weaker as you got better?
The motivation would be to "self-nerf" the hardest content to beat it. Then "self-nerf" it again. That would create the motivation to not prepare, fail lazily and include poor players until you succeed.
Even if the rewards escalate with difficulty, the time required would surely outweigh the rewards.
Think of it like playing an instrument. You practice a song over and over and it becomes easier and easier until you become proficient at it.
Then you move on to ANOTHER song and repeat. As you get better, you're able to learn songs more quickly, and eventually move onto more challenging, complex arrangements.
Would anyone play music if it got harder and harder each time you played a particular song?
The frustration of never being able to play easily and proficently would likely be stifling.
Tobold did a post a couple of years ago about "challenge" or "retirement" (or something like that) gamers. Do you get from level 17 to level 18 in order to deal with even more battle mechanics? Or should a level 18 have it easier, the reward for more success/grinding is more relative power.
A 18 with 120% of the DPS fighting 18 mobs with 120% health is not a gain. This totally defeats the MMO subscription business plan of selling the grind raids/Arena for x weeks to get the gear to play a few weeks before Tier n+1 starts.
It's not so much that I like your idea as that it seems better than anything else out there. I think the biggest flaw in WoW atm is that it is a PvE game focused around raids with very fixed size and relatively fixed composition who need to be involved at the same time or lose your week of lockout.(The PUG q.v.) Guild with 8 raiders die as they can never run anything; at 12-13 people leave since they will never be able to play their lockout. With fixed "ladders"/leagues, the scheduling dynamics would be horribly worse.
Would player's ego accept that, regardless of their gear or skill level they will win x% of the time?
The reason why I think people would not like this idea is because they can't see the in-world explanation for it. When you PvP in arena, you are ranked against people of similar rank, so getting better doesn't make you win more. However, getting better does help you beat any particular team you are paired against.
If the dragon gets harder when you are better, then somehow getting better doesn't help you beat the dragon. But it is always the same dragon so the idea that being more powerful wouldn't help you beat it would be very strange and remind people excessively that they are just playing a game, not fighting a dragon.
I'm not saying the idea has no merit. I've thought about it in the past because it seems like a good solution to some problems. There are some real barriers to implementation, though.
Players would likely become bored with content very quickly because instead of going in each week attempting new more challanging encounters. Your are facing the same encounter just slightly more challanging. There is very few players who are going to get pumped about getting to face a boss that hits 2k more damage.
As well it would be very frustrating for guilds trying to complete the most challanging version of an encounter. If one guild needed a rating of X to be the highest in the world, and when they went to face that boss, the encounter was set at "X," one wipe would send them down to "X-1" and they would basically be done for that week and would have to wait until lockout.
Hi Gevlon,
As an game industry person, I would like to say that "Boss difficulty is decided on the fly based on the team's PvE rating" is not as simple as it sounds. Other people have already brought up comments about how it's not just an issue if making the bosses hit less hard or less hp.
If you look some of the best implementations of difficulty level in other console/PC games, you'll notice that difficulty is often ramped up by tangible differences such as: enemies operate under better AI, new enemies appear in a level where they didn't before, friendly fire is now enabled.
In other words, heroic modes.
If there is an Easy or Casual mode below "normal" it may handicap players like: can't unlock all achievements or all extras, might not be able to see the "real" ending of the game, in addition to simply nerfing enemy health, abilities, and AI.
Traditionally this is done through the use of three or four difficulty levels which the game developer and their QA team can test. If you have a sliding scale of difficulty you can't provide the challenge of introducing new mechanics that a player would normally get because they wanted to play on Hard, because the player would not understand why they do not have friendly fire one week and they do the next.
I suppose it good be planned for (when you hit X-number MMR you will face this additional ability), but I don't think that would make for compelling game design. When players enter a heroic mode, it's by choice. Players might not be happy with their rating going up and then having no choice about facing new mechanics.
The bottom line is that the hypothetical system is a design failure. There is zero incentive to get gear. None. Better gear simply makes everything harder. Getting better gear faster makes everything harder faster. There is no payoff because you already cleared out all of the content on Week 1 - for the next six months, you are simply farming gear and wiping on bosses you already defeated. There is no impetus to NOT make mistakes or take personal responsibility for any choices, because you are equally likely to wipe even if every member performs 100% to their ability all of the time. Half the time, Paragon wipes on Magmaw.
Besides, your stance is contradictory. If people tank their PvE rating, A) why have them "tank" it instead of just giving them Easy and Very Easy interface options?, and B) they obviously want better odds than 50/50 in the first place. You have no interest in facing opponents of equal skill to yourself in Arena, so why would you have any interest in facing bosses of equal skill? To prove to others that you can? Do you enjoy the act of raiding more than the content?
Gear, and the mechanism of gear making things easier for you in-game, is the only reason to do raid content more than once.
FPS nowadays have 4 difficulties. New to FPS, easy, normal, hard. I consider levelling equal to new to MMO. Old raids, Argalon, dungeons for those new to grouped MMO. Then you have normal and heroic dungeon and HC. Maybe one more difficulty is complimentary?
Damn, I wanted to say "pretty good idea" and typed "not a good idea" instead, I think I need my head examined.
Gevlon have you read about guild wars 2, while it doesn't have rating it does have scaleable pve, which is what i think your talking about. Also it scales based on group size, and since it lacks the tank healing dps paradigm it shifts focus more on the individual players ability.
so the scrubs that join in the hard fights die and can only blame themselves, if they leave it actually make the fight easier for the others, as it scales on the amount of players present.
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