When was the last time a new auto-scale zone was made? TBM? I guess this is not the approach that is being pursued... I like old revamped zones, like Seb. I can’t see why you couldn’t make more of these at a relatively low cost...
I don't think difficulty scaling should affect gear at all. Sounds good in theory but to keep players engaged and moving forward group players have to feel they have a reasonable chance to get all their group gear. I think further stratification of the players and gear using scaling would be bad for the game. Give the difficult peeps a chance at a big bag, extra achievements etc. But that would be about it.
LDoN was not scaled. It simply had a specific version at 5 level increments, and group average decided which version was assigned. CotF HAs are probably the closest thing to true scaling.
Oooh, that is gonna work RRREEEAAALLL good. I run by, see a toon 20 levels below me fighting a mob, and not really doing so well. So I drop a quick heal or buff on the guy, and suddenly bang, his mob is 20 levels above him and regenned to full.
Honesty as a casual I care more about getting to experience content than I do about having BIS group gear. If there was a scaling system with easy medium and hard casuals could realistically experience the content and have BIS easy gear. The players that fall between casuals and hardcore could experience the content and have BIS medium gear. The hardcore players would be engaged longer as they would have to work through all three difficulty levels to get BIS. Future expansion tuning would be based on current easy mode gear and go up from there not current hard mode gear. The only downside I see to this is potentially more developer time. I play for content not mangelo stats.
They did this with the "heroic adventures" and everyone just LOVES doing DH over and over for 20 lvs+ As pointed out the problem is scaling is not a simple thing to do right. At some point people want to farm those zones for trade skill mat's or PL'ing or whatever. If everything scales that kind of sucks.
Low cost in dollars maybe, but not in development time. They still have to have the time and people to make the changes. Hardcore heritage zones took about a month a pop.
Again you are further breaking up the group players. So you have three difficulty levels for gear and people are going to want to do what gives them the best gear. So now the pool of players gets reduced into thirds or whatever fractions the easy medium and hard creates. If this was EQ in year 2 with tons of players that could work. We don't have enough players left to subdivide them into even smaller groups. Most players want a reasonable chance to get the best group gear. It isn't just about content it is about gear too. Never been one or the other. And like you said the dev time. Much easier to create just difficulty levels but use the same gear then just add some atta boy you are elite achievements... maybe some small stat bonus or a large bag.
The dev I talked to didn't say and I didn't think to ask about how much manpower was used. I wish I did. I think though that it would have taken more than one Dev since I assume they all work on different features within a zone.
So you are saying currently the playerbase isn't already fragmented for the most part? Hardcore and casuals are mostly playing together on a regular basis? I honestly don't see this to be the case. Your true casuals are already mostly in the first couple zones of a new expansion if at all. A lot of them are in previous expansions doing older content because they cant stay current. Sure there are exceptions where a casual has friends who are more hardcore and they will group up when possible. I would not restrict the different difficulty levels behind progression. If someone on day 1 wants to jump into the hard content they could. If a casual can get a spot in a group doing hard content there should be nothing stopping them in terms of flags. During the times when they cant get into these high powered groups having easier current content available for them to realistically progress through would keep players in current content and provide more incentive to buy current expansions. As it stands there is little incentive to spend money on a non level increase expansion for a casual who wont actually play the majority of the content when current. At best they might get these players during the discounted expansion sale every year making half as much money.