Are FATEs supposed to scale?

I purchased and played the game on the original ARR release for the first couple of weeks until my account was hacked and I was banned for about a month. It took so long to restore my account (and they didn't refund me the rest of my free month) that I simply left.

I'm now back leveling up my original character. Are FATEs supposed to scale to the number of players? On release the FATEs were full of people so it was never an issue. Now I run into FATEs where there are dozens of enemies and I'm completely alone. They are impossible to complete when no one is around. The one in particular I'm thinking of takes place in Eastern Thanalan I believe, near a bridge. There are villagers and supplies you have to protect. I forget the name, but it is basically impossible solo.

Is that working as intended? It makes the FATE experience somewhat disappointing once the masses have moved on past content. I can complete a few of them but it mostly involves slowly pulling one mob away at a time.

Yeah FATEs now are scaled based on how many people had previously participated on the same FATE, the more people joined the FATE and clear it the next same FATE will have difficulty scaled to the number of members.

Not too sure how it is scaled but I think it goes like this : If 15 people joined the FATE and cleared it, the next one will be scaled for 15 people to clear it and if cleared with lower or more people, the subsequent will be based on that number. Possibly same thing if there are people who joined but the FATE failed out of any reason.

If the FATE timed out without anyone joining, it will be scaled to its lowest difficulty on the next one (1 player maybe)

Woah that's a crazy way to scale things. The whole system operates on the assumption that the number of people present X minutes ago (what, 10-30 minutes ago?) is the same as now? Why not have a more active scaling system that adjusts on the fly?

Yeah... fates do that.

It's not a perfect system, but it's a system we have to deal with.

Personally, I always let the timer on boss fates go out and only do the mobs ones. Easier to manage but you'll lose quite a big chunk of exp. If you want to do the boss fates, get your bird out as healer and smack the boss until it's dead. If you're a healer/tank and the fate's scaled.... Good luck.

I remembered a Bellyful fate with my bird out. I thought it was going to be easy but it took me all of the 15 mins to kill him, sparing around 10 secs. On the next Bellyful, it only took around 6 mins. Fate's weird that way.

From my understanding it isn't from how many people killed the FATE the last time it spawned, but more on how fast the last FATE to go down went. So if the whole mob in Coerthas zergs to the Svara FATE chain and rips it apart, the next FATE to spawn will scale accordingly. It isn't the best system, no.

Yeah, like others have said it basically scales to adjust to the previous group that cleared it, rather than dynamically scaling to who's there. Presumably this is because when a FATE spawns almost nobody is there and people eventually show up within a few minutes. Dynamically adjusting for every player that entered (nevermind those that are the corect level by just passing through and not fighting) would probably pose several more challenges technically, but the result would likely be better. Though I suppose it would be weird if you were happily soloing a FATE and then 30 people showed up and the mob you were fighting was suddenly ridiculously strong...

I don't want to get into a big comparison between games, and full disclosure I don't eve play it anymore, but doesn't GW2 have a system for events where they scale in the moment depending on how many people are around? I don't seem to remember it being an issue there.

On a somewhat related note, do people think FATE grinding the lower level (20-45ish) is practical anymore? When I left the game it was all everyone was doing. Now that I'm back the lower levels are so empty most FATEs just seem to end without participation. Makes levelling a pain.

Back then, low level FATE grind used to be a thing but people seldom do them anymore now with a lot of people already hit level 50 on many jobs and EXP rewarded from many other sources like dungeons, roulette and challenge logs (They only do it for relic reasons nowadays). When they introduced Rogue/Ninja on 2.4, there were a huge group of people grinding low level FATEs but then settled down again after a month. Low level FATEs will be swarmed again (level30+) when Heavensward expansion kicks in.

Since you have a tank for main, alternatively you can level in dungeon since tanks can get into one almost immediately.

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Originally Posted by Nutz

Though I suppose it would be weird if you were happily soloing a FATE and then 30 people showed up and the mob you were fighting was suddenly ridiculously strong...

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That wouldn't be much of an issue because those 30 people that joined the FATE would be taking it down just as fast as you had been doing solo. or at least the ideal scaling system would make it feel like that.