Need help with adaptive difficulty scaling

kokushibyou2

I am trying to create a system for adapting the difficulty of my quests based on how well a player is doing as they go along. I have a test quest with a prototype implemented and could use the help of some brave souls to run through it and let me know if they thought it is too hard, or too easy. It's on a 15 minute timer so it won' take long to complete.

The details are:

ID: NW-DTJCRKAGK
Name: 15 Minute Survival
Meant for: Solo or Group (if the adaptive mechanism works right)
Description:
[Currently Published for Balance Testing ]
[Release Coming Soon - Please keep us in mind in the future]
[Have a nice day storming the castle!]

Name: Firene's Base-camp
Type: 15 Minute Timed Survival
Difficulty: Adaptive
Description: Welcome to Firene's Base-camp semiannual sale featuring the latest wedding dress fashions at bargain basement prices. Brides to be are in a frenzy trying to find the perfect dress for the big day and one desperate shopper has requested your help. See if you can keep her dress safe while she grabs her Zen purse from home to buy her dream wedding dress.

orodalf

Er... I ran out of monsters. Right after the 4 Dwarves. And then I can't follow the path because of invisible walls.

How does this mechanism work?

chris1900

I did this on my 33 GWF and it was great, but it sucks that the last mob de-spawned right before I killed it.

grabbag2

36 TR, it was harder than most but doable. I lived through the quest and then I noticed a portal and went through it. Got to a floating race track and fell off the edge and died? What is up with the random portal to nowhere?

kokushibyou2

Sorry Orodalf, Had a bug with my timer when it left the foundry. Thought the fix had been published before I posted, but apparently there was a delay. Everything seems to be working fine now as others have started to complete the quest.

And thank you for the feedback on the path. It was pointing you to the timer, but my intent is for everyone to stay in the encounter circle so I disabled paths for the timer objectives.

famkin

It was pretty tough for my level 50 cleric. I'm not at my home computer, so I'm not playing at my best, but I did die twice.

kokushibyou2

Famkin, do you remember which encounters you died on?

Thanks,

ogremonster

I ran this on my CW and my wife's DC and it really did have a different experience on both. I can figure out how you set up the encounters to cut off with the timers, but I can't figure out how you got the timers to stay so accurate at different levels.

mee2002

Very impressed with this. Would like to know how you set it up.
*38 GF w/ cleric pet, difficulty was perfect. Only problem was my pet is HAMSTER*

kokushibyou2

mee2002 wrote: »

Very impressed with this. Would like to know how you set it up.
*38 GF w/ cleric pet, difficulty was perfect. Only problem was my pet is HAMSTER*

Thanks mee2002,

I set it up using a "walk the plank" timer. Under the terrain I put up a racetrack 1500 ft long. At the start, I have a spawn point for an Easy guard and at the end I have a Hard mob. When the guard spawns he starts walking a path that takes him 3 minutes to complete and leads him straight to a mob that kills him very quickly. This lets me split the quest up into 5, 3 minute segments. In each segment I then created encounter chains that start with easy mobs that get harder over time. The first mob in the chain spawns when the timer objective starts and all the mobs in the chain are set to despawn when the timer runs out.

The adaptive part comes from linking each mob in the later chains to the equivalent mob in the previous chain. So in say chain 4, the 5th mob will only spawn if the player was able to kill the 5th mob in chain 3. This will allow a bit of rest between chains for players that aren't killing all of the mobs in each chain.

Honestly, I have never been able to get all of the encounters to spawn myself, I think it will require a small group to get the last encounter to spawn (Bridezilla), but I have never tested with a group.

orodalf

... That's some cool voodoo. Kudos to you.

eviledick

Very, very cool. Id' like to see your figures for distance vs. timer duration.

kokushibyou2

eviledick wrote: »

Very, very cool. Id' like to see your figures for distance vs. timer duration.

The guards appear to walk 8.3f/s no matter what you set their patrol speed to; this is just average from their total time on the patrol I have set in this quest. The overall average may be getting slowed down by them stopping at each patrol point. IRC, I saw another post that said all mobs walk at 10f/s.

neverwinter1776

I love how clever people are!
I was/am using a single mob spawn boxed in on top of a saw trap. Ie. when mob dies timer is done. but I like the walk the plank idea very much.
Now if they ONLY let us save maps and assets locally so we don't have to set these things up every time.

Neverwinter1776