Sorry to make two threads so quickly, but they’re on completely different topics and I’m a little short on time.
Anyone familiar with Lord of the Rings Online might know what I mean when I mention skirmishes. They were basically instanced encounters you could enter alone via a specific NPC in larger cities, like a special kind of dungeon or quest chain type deal. The big thing about them, though, was that you could select difficulty options for the encounter, which determined your loot, experience, and other various rewards.
For example, I could choose one skirmish encounter—say, defending a gate or castle whose name escapes me—then set it to Level 30, meaning the encounter would assume the player was level 30 with regard to monster levels and difficulty, and then I could select Party of 2, Party of 3, Party of 4 etc, which determined how many monsters spawned at a time and whether or not certain stronger monsters spawned at all (or gave new attacks to existing monsters). Many of the actual dungeons followed a similar principal to some extent.
I liked the design of these because if I wanted loot, I could set it to the appropriate level—or even a higher level—get a party together and give it a go. If I just wanted to experience the content and screw around, I could set it to an extremely low difficulty and get no reward at all besides the fun I had running through. And if I had a friend and we wanted to test our limits, we could slowly crank up the notches until we couldn’t handle it anymore, just to see what we could really do.
This kind of difficulty scaling is an option I feel is missing here. Granted, most games don’t have it, but it was extremely popular for all the reasons I’ve listed, so I thought maybe we could consider it here as well. Fractals are similar, but they still require a base group of five, whereas the kind of user-defined difficulty scaling I’m suggesting allows for solo or duo play as well.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting any unique drops, or even good drop rates, or even drops at all for that matter; I really don’t care. I just loved the idea of being able to toy with different difficulty scales with a partner. I realize the monumental nature of the task, but even so, I felt obligated to at least throw the hat in the ring. I know that I, my friend, and a few others would enjoy this kind of content, not for rewards but for fun, and with a player base this large, we can’t be the only ones. It wouldn’t get in anyone’s way, but would give us some fun things to do.
A brief summation of the skirmish dynamic:
-Level difficulty affects the level of the monsters spawned
-Party number affects the number, and in some cases types, of mobs spawned
-Different skirmishes were unlocked at certain levels, by completing other skirmishes, or by buying them from the cash shop
-Mob type spawn-sets and (in our case) veteran/champion mob types were RNG each new encounter
-Certain other random events would occur inside the skirmishes—a giant bear one time, or a special champion another, or another small event—and had an associated achievement (again, just for fun). Each skirmish might’ve had five or six of these possible random encounters, with maybe one or two rolling each encounter
As a side-note, I also enjoyed being able to scale down a dungeon to the point where I got no rewards but could run through with a friend to see the content without forming a whole party, just to experience it.
Thanks for reading.
(edited by crawlerxp.1536)