Quote Originally Posted by Wintersandman View Post
That is just your view on fates. They can be engaging it is all in how they are designed. It could be "Sneak through the tunnel, open the gate, without being detected" while another simultaneous fate is going on "Seige the gate". It is a race to see which works and you could have x and y players participating in each. So if you are solo you could be sneaking through while an 8 man party is trying to seize the gate. A FATE is literally just an open world time based event and you can make it anything you want, the only limitation is imagination so don't get hung up on the word.
Correct - on EXISTING FATEs. Not to say they couldn't do better/different in the future, but I cannot for the life of me identify a singular "fun" FATE.

Your examples are good in theory, but put some implementation to them. Solo sneaking would be trivial and not challenging since it would just be a binary factor. If it was a split effort, i.e. 1 light party goes sneak, other breaks front door, that leaves some good gameplay as the sneaking group can focus on taking out small sized trash packs that try to flee, or activate warnings/hazards, etc. Kind of like the 8 man dungeon where you have to avoid the spotlights, patrols, and also make sure you're preventing the existing fights from fleeing/activating anything. THEN couple that with the affix system present. That'd make some compelling gameplay IMO.

Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
The "same" fight doesn't have to function identically for 4 people as it would 8, though. Many fights already scale their mechanics based on the number of survivors. (Heck, there's quickly a complaint thread up any time a trial fails to do that, because it makes it harder to underman farm in the next expansion when all challenge is gone from it either way.)

You don't need necessarily to design a fight for one set composition. You can generate the conditions for a skill table's formation, rather than using just one actual skill table for all comers.

Now, IF you were to design for just a 1/2/1 or 2/4/2 experience, that would then have the problems you've mentioned -- a light party design would be forced to have more concentrated intervals of damage or more lenient rest damage between, because all ability mitigation is dealt over half the uptime as in a full party -- forcing use of Cover skills or for those tankbusters to be dealt as multiple hits as to be swapped between mid-chain (your easiest standard fix for light party upscaling). But there's simply no need to fetter oneself in that way. You can have x adds with y damage at z frequency (timings, usually associable with z skillsets' coverage), whatever you need.
In order to make generally WELL tuned content you need some fixed lines somewhere. My personal beliefs are that the experience is more valuable than its flexibility. if we add too much flexibility, I think it'll be nigh impossible to preserve the difficulty/engagement precedent I am trying to set.