[Feature Request] Scalable Content

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Axel, Aug 19, 2021.

  1. Axel Furry Hats OP

    It would be nice if there was something in the game that got progressively more challenging as you progressed, like a mission that had multiple scalable layers. As you climb up, the gear dropped gets better, but after a certain level the gear no longer gets better (don't want to compete with raid gear) but the difficulty continues to increase infinitely to above raid-mob difficulty and beyond. Getting to a certain "level" you would get achievements and possibly a way for players across all servers to track how far they've gotten so that there's competition.

    I think this would be good for the game for many reasons.
    1. Weeks 1-4, farming group content for augs/progression, then week 5 hits, everybody should be close to max, T1 raids come out, then guilds beat those raids and then the game is dead until next raid day. This continues until all raid tiers are released and until the next expansion unless there's an event (like GMM) that comes out. With scalable content, if you weren't able to get to the layer that gives above COV raid gear, but below next expansion's raid gear, then maybe you will with the gear that you got from the raids.
    2. Alternative way to get good gear for group-oriented players. Right now, the best gear for these players is evolving gear & the earring, which is fine, but they're a grind fest and they're in very limited slots. Scalable missions would make it easier and more fun for these players to get some decent gear that isn't just ore drops from missions.
    3. Missions currently are stale and easy. The only way to make missions fun during the mid-season of an expansion is to speedrun the missions. As a tank player, as much as I love never putting my 2hander away, it would be nice to have a scenario where I have to pull my shield out in a mission, and as a bard, it's pretty lame that my kit only revolves around my DPS. Having to use my CC abilities in a mission would be a cool way to skip over mechanics in the group game (I can't tell you the last time I loaded mez, or my mediocre, group rune, or even tank helper buffs in the group game unironically). I'm sure enchanters feel the same way. Getting to the content that requires me to load that stuff and not focus entirely on my (and my group's) DPS would be a breath of fresh air.
    4. Pride. The only way for me to compete with anyone on another server is by getting the highest hDEX or achievement points on magelo or sharing parses with them via discord, both of these things can be cheesed or variable (all raid forces are different, making it nearly impossible to get a fair comparison between anybody in different raids). Being able to show off that you and your group completed Floor 20 of X dungeon, however, is totally fair. Anyone can get a group of 6 people of any class and grind some missions.
    5. Player retention. The summer months are pretty stale, there's not much of a reason to log in outside of raids for most players at the high end. Having scalable missions or content would be a point of pride for people and give them a reason to log in during the week to work on trying to get the #1 slot.
  2. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    They have had that in the past but it never seems to work out as expected and players generally have not liked the content.
    Coagagin likes this.
  3. Niskin Clockwork Arguer

    This already exists in CoTF, TDS, and TBM. Go there at a higher level than that expansion's cap, run an instanced mission, experience true pain. I'm still stuck on a Dead Hills mission from CoTF at level 110 when that expansion's cap was 100. There's a mob with a damage shield that does 4-5k per hit, I'm dead in seconds.

    They just don't have the manpower to deal with scaling these things properly, and we as players are the ones who suffer for it. There should be no reason I can't go back to old expansion content and complete progression with a 10 level advantage and multiple expansion gear advantage. Yet there is, for every expansion with this scaling.

    It's not a terrible idea if it's implemented well, I just don't think that's an option at this point. CoTF was fine until RoS released and they didn't want people leveling in scaled instances faster than the new content. That's when it all started going to pieces. There's too many bits to tweak in these things, and even after they tried to dial it back, it was still ridiculous.
    Stymie, Skuz and Coagagin like this.
  4. Velisaris_MS Augur

    They've demonstrated that they are awful when it comes to dealing with scaled content. No more.

    I'd rather they spend time fixing the issues that are already there, rather than wasting time making more problems.
  5. Axel Furry Hats OP

    When? If it was scaling to level, that's not what I'm talking about, as that only changes replayability after the expansion, not during. I'm asking for something where you beat floor 1, you have the option to do floor 2, then floor 3, and so on.

    Which Dead Hills mission? I just went into a DH Heroic Adventure and pulled the zone and killed it in 30 seconds at 115. It only scales up to level 100 now, everything was a green and I didn't drop below 90% HP.
  6. Windance Augur

    Axel. Your post is a wall of text. It was very hard to read.

    The original "heroic adventures" were setup to scale with level from 85 - 105.

    They even had two raids: Hate and Fear which scaled as well.

    The problem with this scaling content:

    Issue #1 - The same 2-3 missions became the 'go to' XP farming. Then for the next 3+ expansions you were doing the same missions. At least now you get a different 2-3 missions to farm for each expansion.

    Issue #2 - Scaling the content is not trivial and was never really balanced well.

    When there was a level increase, the mobs on the raids made it harder to do at 110 then 105.

    They didn't ADD any new gear so you're now doing harder content for outdated gear.

    The dev's finally gave in and made it so the scaling content didn't go past the max for the expansion it was released. Hate/Fear are still over tuned compared to when they were released.


    BUT it doesn't sound like that is what you really want.

    You seem to want:

    1. Content that is released in phases so every couple months there is something new.

    2. Content that you can 'compete' against others

    So you are really asking for a repeat of the LDoN leaderboards and/or RoF style of content.
    Elyssanda likes this.
  7. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    That isn't scalability, that is progression where you have to beat the previous mission to unlock the next one. As we already have a limited amount of missions due to limited developer time I would never see something like this happening. Sure it would be a great idea and could provide some good content but I still don't see that happening.


    You are talking about how it scales after many attempts to fix it.
  8. Niskin Clockwork Arguer


    Excavating an Answer

    I was wrong, I was 108 when I was trying to run it, but in full Conflagrant gear. Of course it wasn't bad at 115, you are 5 levels past RoS scaling, and likely in ToV or CoV gear. You can eventually out level them, but it takes a while.

    When they initially made them scale up, they were worse than now. Later they capped the mob levels, but not the spells. So you can get damage shields and AoE's and DoTs that hit like RoS mobs while the thing doing it is light blue and still not getting resists on you.

    The point is that scaling isn't just "set level cap and forget it" it involves a lot of things, and we have three expansion packs worth of experience with that to prove it. I've seen 110 tanks get destroyed in TBM missions, even in Snowbound, whereas at 111 it starts to ease up.

    Excavating an Answer is a short mission, and I've never made it past the halfway point. Sometimes it's the crazy damage shield on the first light blue mob, sometimes it's a pack of 3 unmezable mobs near the halfway point. Those are dark blue at 108 and hit like trucks. In the end I've just leveled up and will go back for the achievement later, but it was super frustrating to be in the middle of CotF progression when RoS released and suddenly go from progressing to hitting a brick wall. And we had to complain like crazy just to get them to dial it back a bit. If they had finished retuning it maybe I wouldn't be so salty, but they didn't.

    Scaling can be convenient, but it creates too many problems, at least when scaling up. I think the scaling down has worked fine.
  9. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    Scaling down isn't too bad it if is set up and left along, scaling up for future level increases is bad, just have to look at TBM to see that. :rolleyes:
  10. Mulerien Elder

    As mentioned, they tried this. There was a big problem when the TLPs (specifically, Phinigel) got to the HAs, they were scaled for much higher levels, and the named/boss mobs (specifically in TBM) were much, much harder than they should be era. They were using out of era AE's that would 1 shot all but the best raid geared toons, and they would hit like trucks requiring top tiered raid tanks using deflection and their best discs just to beat. DPG then had to go back and de-scale those missions for the TLPs, wasting a bunch of manhours to do it.
  11. Axel Furry Hats OP

    That's scaling based on level. Not what I'm asking for. Did you read the post?





    @Everyone who is saying "they tried that" they didn't. I'm asking for Mythic+ in EverQuest. IDK why people are thinking "scaling after beating it then moving onto a harder version of the same mission" is the same as "level scaling". I didn't mention anything about level in my original post

    I don't want content released in phases, I want content where when I beat it, I can immediately do it again but harder, or in 6 hours, whatever. I am actively against releasing content in phases, raids being released in phases is the absolute worst thing to happen to competitive raiding in EQ. I want all 9 raids to come out at once, to get to raid 2 you have to beat raid 1, and each raid gets progressively harder. That would make the race better than "alright, set aside 30 minutes on release day and hope we don't have lag".

    And yes, I think most of the high end players want to compete.
    Ssdar and Elyssanda like this.
  12. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    After seeing the stupid decisions made around Heroic Adventures and their ridiculous move-the-goalposts "strategy", which the team still has yet to finish repairing, I literally trust DarkPaw with "Scalable Content" about as far as I could throw all of them together at the same time.
    I'm a big fan of most of what the team do, but this was an absolute debacle and they ignored the entire live playerbase's protestations at the time which was incredulous, it took TDS-raid-geared tanks being 1-shotted in TBM upon its unlocking on Phinigel for them to actually realise how badly they had messed up.
    I defend the team on a lot of things, but on this point I will put the boot in, it is a kicking deserved.

    [IMG]
    Raccoo likes this.
  13. Windance Augur

    I suspect its because:

    A: Title = "Scalable Content"
    B: Post = Wall of text.
    Skuz and Raccoo like this.
  14. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    Having different difficulty levels of the same content still requires developer time and most people would rather them spend that time on new content then tuning the same content for multiple difficulty levels and making new items for them. You simply can't compare what they can do in WoW and other games that have design that is more flexible for features like that.

    As for the raid unlocks that is what they used to do and moving away from that has been a big improvement on the raid game as you no longer have to worry about juggling flagged members among other benefits. Honestly with the old system is just came down to who could raid the closest to lockouts to get the flags the fastest. And if you just mean you have to beat it once to get the next raid that would end up being exactly what we have now with raiders just walking up and killing each raid in rapid succession.
  15. Ozon Augur

    I think he is asking for group content somewhat similar to the Living Legacy raid where the mob repops a bit more difficult each time up to 21 times?
  16. Torin New Member

    My interpretation is he is suggesting like an "ancient dungeon" used in a lot of classic rpgs.

    So for instance, floor 1 - 3 is tier 1 of the current expansion difficulty wise. You keep increasing the difficulty the higher you go (or lower if it's a cave), eventually getting higher then the current end group zones for that expansion. So maybe the dungeon tops out at say 10 floors or something. But by the top floor you are fighting mobs 30% harder then the current end zone, with loot rewards/and or exp improved to compensate the difficulty.

    Assuming this was the case, to me it would be like a super big dungeon similar to the Guardian in dragonscale, but with way more levels and increasing beyond that expansions standard max group difficulty.

    I would love something like that, but I doubt the resources exist to pull something like that off and be actually balanced.

    It would probably be much easier to make something like DoDH's normal/hard missions then to create a properly balanced dungeon with increasing difficulty and reward as you progress.
  17. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    To get this would mean going back to needing keys, no thank you! The devs have already said they don't want us beating all raids on the first night/week of the launch.

    The way they do raids now is far better than having to collect 12/18/21 or however many they decide keys to progress to the next tier.

    Given the choice of keys or waiting a month for the next tier of raids I'll take the wait over keys everytime.
    Skuz and Ozon like this.
  18. Bobokin Augur

    If some places did that, then fine, but if all of them did, forget it. That would bite.

    DBG has ruined zones trying to scale them.
  19. Windance Augur

    Could always go play Diablo 3 - Infinitely scaling content for those who like to do the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over .... =)