Unfair scaling system for (some?) Maps

[Paronskaft]

I joined a deralia sewers map to meet some new players I wasn't familiar with, and to explore because I had never been there. These players all had around 300 health and I think Im just over 700 health so I assumed I could help them with healing and maybe the harder monsters, being there primarily to socialize and hope the community would grow with new people.

What happened was apparently the map was super easy up until I joined, and when I got there they had just gotten to some mummies that had scaled up with me joining, which at this point I can understand and somewhat agree with the concept itself.

What happened was the mummies were so strong that I was almost getting one shotted over and over and even used a crystal of relocation in hopes to help more by being there slightly more. My wolf died almost immediately, the room is so small that I couldn't run (more mummies spawned in the narrow enough hallway the only direction out of the room), so died several times and said I was sorry I ruined their map and if they wanted my help with anything that I'd just be on a different server grinding.

Then they mentioned that some higher levels were joining right that minute, so I decided to stay and had literally no change in what I experienced. At some point after I gave up they killed the mummy, but I was down to doing 70 or 75% damage already and when it scaled up because I joined, being the highest level I thought I'd be able to not get totally run over by 4 mummies + a boss mummy In a tiny room with no escape, and apparently I heard one of the mummies even would heal the other ones.

I understand there aren't a lot of people to work on this game, that there's no legitimate professional coders around, it's old in the first place so no one wants to put time and effort into it, but people still like this game and after I had been a regular player (offline for years without Internet or intense lag) I thought I fit into the demographic the makers of this game were looking for.

What I'm looking for is a serious conversation about the reality of this and if it's a viable thing to change in order to at least keep the players we do have, and if we can't change the scaling system then why not.

The bottom line is the scaling system seems clearly and obviously unfair in these circumstances, and now that I'm at where I am now I'm getting convinced to just play offline, even with the unfairly diminished experience rewards (my opinion, and not what I want this thread to be debated about).
Clearly me joining seemed to ruin their map too, being as far in as they were already.

 

[Thothie]

The auto-scaler is indeed quite fubar, and doesn't really have the intended effect. I'd prefer a system that'd allow the high level and low level characters to work together, but core problem is, we don't have a level system, either for players, or monsters, or even for most items - and that makes that hard. The current system does provide an opportunity for high level players to gather together and get better stuff while also facing a bigger challenge, but that's about it (and I suppose it's a bit better than some earlier attempts).

I've had some ideas for setting up a better system that'd allow folks of varying levels to work together more smoothly, but it is indeed an epic task - involves at least setting levels for all items (of which there are hundreds), tiers for all mobs (of which there are thousands), and doing some odd math to boost the damage specialists can put out, but not that which they can take, etc.

 

[Paronskaft]

What about copying the maps for each tier, so people could votemap for tier 1 2 or 3? I understand that may be more taxing on the servers or something along those lines, but it would solve this legitimate problem, either that or raising it from changing at 1000 health on the server to 2000 or something, which also seems easier than both your more thought out solution or mine if it really would be too much strain on the servers

I love this game but when I see too much stuff like this it turns into me being there to socialize more than actually play the game and what I genuinely want is to play the game without having an instant death over and over.

It would at least be fair to the people that I screwed over by just joining the game if it could at least scale back down when I'd leave the server and they wouldn't have to start over too.

I don't want to come off as too critical, I want to be constructive, but I also want to be clear about communicating.

 

[Thothie]

We have a *bit* of that with the Nightmare series, but not much (though we originally had planned to have Nightmare maps for all the core maps, at least.)

Granted we do have over 80 maps... With a fair amount in each range.

It'd take a determined mapper to go about and repopulate each map for say 2-3 tiers. And again, with the monsters lacking level designations, it takes quite a bit of trial and error to balance a map for a certain tier.

 

[zeus9860]

Well the map is considered hard tier, with a suggested hp requirement of 600 to actually beat it. Not sure if this info is in the map itself, i know alot of the info listed in that link is not on par with the one in-game. As some of the info in-game is outdated like lodagond1 requesting like 1k hp when it can be easily played at 600hp if you know what you are doing.

Mummies can be a pain to fight, but all it takes is some fire walls or volcanoes to make them less aggressive on you, use this combined with healing and shielding and some ranged combat and it will eventually work in your favour.

There are worse enemies than the mummies aswell, if you think those are tough/annoying, wait untill you see some of the latest specimens that can one hit kill you through 50 layers of shielding or still hit like a truck through that many layers of shielding.

Also i should mention that, those players would more than likely not finish the map anyways. Unless they have some decent gear and tactics, which i highly doubt as the amount of decent gear for that hp range is nearly non existant, so they would have to rely mostly on tactics. So don't feel bad about the map being unbeatable and that you possibly ruined the map for them.

 

[Thothie]

It's true, a 300hp crew is unlikely to push through that map even at the lowest level, and an additional 700hp shouldn't have increased the tier by more than +0.5/1.0, even if they were on the edge, but that's still nearly +50% again the damage and double the HP, and the new player probably isn't doubling the damage, let alone the damage capacity, of the group. I think most of those mummies are "down capped" but ya gotta push the total HP pretty high before that effect kicks in (and by then they'd be practically 1-hitting the 300hp guys).

It is in the mid-end of the Hard category, but true, I don't think the map has an HP warning... I'll see about adding one.

 

[Uberzolik]

to be fair, we actually did manage to knock down the first set of mummies more or less on our own, but yeah it would've been extremely time consuming to clear out the rest so don't feel too bad cus u didnt really ruin it