Guild Wars 2

With all the talk about scaling problems (scaling stats, scaling skills, scaling trait), here’s a solution:

Scale monsters, not players.

• All monsters are default level 80.
• Each player sees a monster downscaled to his/her own level.

Advantages:

• Monsters are simple: no traits, just a few basic stats and a couple attack skills. Scaling mobs is much less complicated compared to scaling players.
• Most players are level 80 so even if downscaling isn’t done perfectly, it won’t be used most of the time anyway (compare to now, where downscaling is the norm).
• No interface changes are needed as you never see anyone else’s damage numbers in this game (who knew, no FPS monitor FTW!) and health bars are all by percentage.

Server resources:

• When an attack happens, monster stats are first downscaled, then all computations proceed as they do now. This is not very many extra computations. The downscaling can be precalculated and stored if you want to avoid any real time downscaling computations.

But what happens when a lvl 80 and a lvl 40 attack the same mob?

I do think everything should be level 80 though. Especially dungeons. If anything we should be scaled up to 80 or just make them 80 only.

What spoj said, though story modes should remain the way they are imo.

spoj.9672:

But what happens when a lvl 80 and a lvl 40 attack the same mob?

No problem:

for any level, say level 40:

1. the damage is calculated as if the mob is level 40
2. that damage is then converted into a percentage of the mob’s total level 40 health (one division operation).
3. that percentage of health is how much the mob ends up losing.

Health bars show percentages, so no need to change anything for that kind of information.

So, in theory, I could create a brand new character, finish the starter mission. Leave as a level 2, hit the bank, do a little shopping….

Then use a Teleport to a friend over to Cursed Shore, and face down a level 2 Risen Priest of Grenth? Maybe then I pop a few Tomes of Knowledge, down some potions and eat some food…. Since the mob only calibrates at the start, a clear advantage is here.

The hypothetical aside, the game simply isn’t structured to accommodate such a change without a lot of consideration and rework. Resources, I would argue are needed elsewhere.

Also, you posted a similar idea in another similar thread. Why repost?

Edit: Arguably, you could implement a floor level that a mob wouldn’t downscale past… but again the point being that there’s a lot of consideration to take into account that is more that trivial.

The damage is dynamically calculated every hit with one multiplication. It should be doable fairly easily. Other stuff like balancing / etc. are a bigger issue, just like with the current downscaling.

It’s doable, but will need more coding and I don’t think this improve the game. At least, it doesn’t improve the game enough to be worth the time the devs would be putting into that instead of actual content or features.

All new maps from now one will be 80, so any change won’t really help the game in the future, except if we add some new starting maps for new playable race (which won’t happen in the near future).

I prefer the approach Spoj propose. Dungeon should all be level 80 and scale people to 80. The majority of player that do dungeon are level 80 and they should be made for them. But I don’t think they will ever really touch dungeon at all. Reworking existing content isn’t that profitable for Anet and they seem to focus on fractal anyway.

Thaddeus.4891:

It’s doable, but will need more coding and I don’t think this improve the game. At least, it doesn’t improve the game enough to be worth the time the devs would be putting into that instead of actual content or features.

Considering all the troubles they’ve had with downscaling, and the fact that they’ll probably have to redo it again after this current attempt, maybe it’d be easier to just spend a bit more effort this one time and just do mob scaling instead.

This would open up a ton of content to level 80 players since most of the world is lower level.

As for making dungeons level 80 — I’d be sufficiently satisfied with that, but I honestly don’t think they care enough about dungeons to bother, even if they thought it was a good idea. This idea is more or less a way to get dungeons to level 80 under the guise of helping open world PvE (which it does, I think).