New FATE System Poorly Conceived

[Alhanelem]

We don't need FATEs to scale to the number of players that completed it LAST TIME. We need FATEs that scale to the number of people in the area THIS TIME. I am having a hard time believing a professional game development company even came up with such a badly thought out system.

This is difficult because it would have to be done on the fly. You can't really scale an NM up or down after someone has started fighting it, and "kill the mobs" fates could only reasonably scale as new waves spawn. It would be unfair to the people already fighting if the monsters suddenly gained more HP because some people who might even just be passing by entered the FATE radius. You need to consider the reprecussions of your ideas.

Most of the time participation in fates will be fairly consistent so this really isn't the issue you're making it out to be. If the participating population suddenly decreases, it will only be more difficult once. Not a big deal.

[frostmagemari]

This is difficult because it would have to be done on the fly. You can't really scale an NM up or down after someone has started fighting it, and "kill the mobs" fates could only reasonably scale as new waves spawn. It would be unfair to the people already fighting if the monsters suddenly gained more HP because some people who might even just be passing by entered the FATE radius. You need to consider the reprecussions of your ideas.

SQE has systems that track who has aggro on enemies; the amount of targets with active aggro on enemies should be enough to determine how many are active in a fight and how the system needs to adjust itself.

Some may ask about people that leave FATES? It's already in the game that after you reach the leash length of an enemy, they drop aggro and are no longer on the active list to determine difficulty in the FATE. Some people will troll the system, of course, but not enough to impact the system in a notable way (if done properly), and if by chance they do cause a disruption, make that a reportable offense under griefing.

Instead of giving SQE free passes on everything, maybe they should actually be held to a standard.

[Naunet]

This is difficult because it would have to be done on the fly.

Other MMOs manage it.

Scale the FATE to the number of people in the zone at the time it spawns. Easy as pie (and pie is very easy to bake). You can also implement successive "phases" of a FATE that only occur if previous phases are completed on time (i.e. if there's enough people participating) and introduce harder encounters.

Instead of giving SQE free passes on everything, maybe they should actually be held to a standard.

I like you!

[Castillan]

Real easy to scale a FATE in real time.

For single critter fates. The critter has set HP. The players still see themselves hitting for the same amount of damage. However, simply silently divide the damage dealt to the critter's base HP by the number of people who have registered against the aggro system of the critter within the last 30 secs, and update that value every 30 secs to account for people entering/leaving the fate area. Heck, the system already tracks who's on each critter's aggro list, just silently divide the number by that aggro list length.

For multi-critter fates, as we know, each death advances towards completion. Divide the advancement rate by the number of unique participants on the aggro charts, and update that value very 10s or so.

Easy.

[RynaultB]

This is difficult because it would have to be done on the fly. You can't really scale an NM up or down after someone has started fighting it, and "kill the mobs" fates could only reasonably scale as new waves spawn.

Hate to quote Blizzard on this, but in MoP they introduced scaling mobs specifically named mobs (NMs for FF). As the mob is hit by more players its HP and damage and all that is scaled up. I remember watching a mobs HP go fro 5mil to 40mil in a matter of seconds when each player hit it with an ability.