[FEEDBACK] Difficulty levels + wish list for m19 content changes

dolrey

Hello. Here is something like a wish list for content improvements and constructive feedback for future changes in m19. Probably it will be a wall of text but I'll try to divide it into logical paragraphs. There will be not so many of concrete details and this feedback is addressed mostly to content designers. Well.. take your cup of coffee or tea and have a nice 10-min break. So let's get started.

ADVANTAGES OF NEVERWINTER ONLINE

NWO is unique mmorpg which has its game community already for more than 6 years. Why do we love this game?

1. It has great D&D lore and storytelling.
   
2. Pretty nice graphics, sound and atmospheric locations.
   
3. Very good non target combat (probably even the best I ever seen).
   
4. Adequate donate system what is important for many users of mmorpg.
   
5. Finally all classes are in playable state when each of them do what it is supposed to do (in m19 probably we'll see even more improvements).
   

The essence of this paragraph is that NWO has very high potential to be good and popular mmorpg but players will agree with me that something is still missing.

DISADVANTAGES OF NEVERWINTER ONLINE

Many of you now thought about game bugs. But to be honest most part of them is not that critical at all and usually is fixed in few weeks after new module release. So right now NWO has enough bugs of course but this is not the most important problem which makes game process worser.

The most important problem is the fact that content is not adapted to different groups of players. Let me explain this. NWO is relatively old game so evidently there are players who just started to play (beginners), who play it for not so long (usual players with mid item level characters) and who play this game for many years (veterans with bis characters). The boundaries between them are quite blurred but these 3 conditional groups of players still exist.

With beginners everything is fine. They have nice locations for them with interesting quests. They explore new game with new interesting for them class mechanics.

The problem comes when other 2 groups get same content (dungeons or campaigns with quests). And because of usual difference in stats same content can be too hard for usual players while at the same time it can be too trivial for experienced players. So if usual players can improve their build/equipment/stats to decide this problem (what is absolutely normal for every game) then what experienced players should do when again and again they get trivial and not interesting content for them?

Fighting process is 90% of each game of same genre. And when these 90% are bad to play and boring then all game is bad and not interesting.

DECISION

Evidently it is impossible to make same content interesting for all item level groups of players just because for example 50k of monster's damage (before damage resistance) is too much for some characters and just a joke for others (it is not about player's skill it is just usual math). This is why idea of difficulty levels became very popular in game community.

Really making content with different levels of difficulty and rewards where monsters have different offensive and defensive stats is logical to calibrate content to each group of characters. So all players can get right difficulty for them if content will be divided into 3 groups:

1. Easy version. As the name suggests this is version of dungeon with lowest stats and rewards for characters with low item level to players should be able to learn mechanics of monsters and how to play in this dungeon.
   
2. Normal version. Probably the version of each dungeon as it is supposed to be and with current rewards for players with mid item level characters.
   
3. Hard version. The hardest version of each dungeon for endgame top characters. Yes even top 700-900khp tanks with healing of top healers should tryhard doing tanking there and top dps should do their best to don't let to tank fall under attacks of monsters with crazy stats. It should be kind a "dark souls" difficulty level with absolutely no mercy to players. And please NO STUPID DPS CHECK PHASES (it's not what we want also because tanks and healers should be focused on their main job instead of using damage buffs from artifacts)!!
   

And to make all these difficulty levels useful and demanded rewards should be tuned very well:

1. For example if normal version in N times longer (in terms of time) than easy version then rewards in normal version should be higher more than in N times than in easy version. This will prevent abuse of speedruns of easy versions just because it has more profit.
   
2. What about hard version it should 100% have really tasty rewards. Because difficulty of this type of dungeons will be not about "you have to complete it 100 times wasting many hours to have chance to get something" (it will be about to complete it at least once). As good rewards I can suggest 100-150k AD (exactly astral diamonds, not just astral brilliants because they have daily cap wich can be reached on usual content) plus some random unique for each dungeon expensive loot.
   

This can give to experienced players challenging content which they were asking for. And what is more important this content will be demanded thank to good loot what will give reason to players to improve their characters. Also thank to the fact that expensive loot will be different in different dungeons all hard versions of dungeons will be demanded.

REALISATION AND INTERACTION WITH PLAYERS

Here we go to more technical details. And of course comes logical question: how many stats and damage monsters should have in hard version of dungeon? I would like to suggest to ask players about this and make unique interaction with community.

You can make special arena on live server with waves of monsters or training pupets for few weeks (or forever for future tests and observations for grouth of character's strenghts) where system will check some important for each class role values. Such as:

1. How many damage per second tank can absorb.
   
2. How many healing per second healer can create.
   
3. How many damage per second damage dealer can do.
   

Each player will have his unique best result in one or two of categories depending on his class role. And you can divide them into 3 groups:

1. Lowest 1/3 (of damage absorption, healing and damage dealt).
   
2. Middle 1/3.
   
3. Highest 1/3.
   

Using these average values you can create monsters with right stats for each difficulty level of dungeons.
Also you can show best values in character list of all characters as alternative or addition to item level. So players will have more information about their group members for better group creation (and also this will prevent tries to intentionally lowering these numbers to mislead developers).

__________
So thank you for your attention and sorry for my english. Hope this feedback can help to improve the game.
@asterdahl @terramak @noworries#8859 @mimicking#6533 @nitocris83 @cwhitesidedev#9752