Suggestion: Dynamic Hunt difficulties

[Raqrie_Tohka]

Re-post of something I put in another hunt thread, which I think is quite descriptive of how one could visualize this dynamic difficulty thing.

And I quote (myself):

Well, let's use our imaginations for a sec. If a hunt knew that more players will arrive soon, and give it a "good fight", if the hunt crowd of players surrounding it would just wait for a bit, and what it really really longs for is a nice good fight, then it won't even properly engage you until both you and it, the hunt, come to some sort of mutual consensus of rules of engagement. So if programmable, yes, a "smart" hunt that adjusts its difficulty depending on the number of people attacking it, being eligible to drop some hunt-specific rare rewards and items (like minions, materials, etc.) if it is happy that it got to have a nice big fight with many players (thus enticing players to wait for more people to do the kill together), and adding extra abilities and "savage mode hunt" to make it more "fun" while more people are fighting it.

The hunt would fight less "passionately" and be weaker if a small party of people tried to fight it at very early or late server hours when there's not that many people awake for a hunt, but in compensation it will respawn sooner so more people will have a chance to go at it again, and also because the hunt "didn't get a good fight", and comes back sooner looking for more fight (and fun).

The hunt will also have some sort of "cross-realm a.i." listening in on other hunts, so if a chain-hunt is happening, the hunt will adjust its "expectations" depending on how many people, how fast, and how popular the other hunts in other regions got killed ... and make a "mental note" of how to prepare. So if you show up at its door and promptly start pounding it it will of course be happy you came, but will not be too pleased that you started "too promptly", and will likely carelessly swap you aside, or "hunker down"/"kite and cc us around" and simply refuse to properly take damage and fight, until the main groups can arrive. Of course if the main group takes too much time to arrive, more than the average time the other hunts had to wait, or whatever is "reasonable", then this hunt will likely realize this is about as many people as it'll get for this fight and "agree" to fight as is, or at a lower "threshold" of the dynamic difficulty. BUT if it hears whispers in the wind of many people still coming and some early puller starting at it, it'll get really really angry, and promptly chew up that early puller and spit'em out at the feet of the not-very-amused hunt crowd either, as an example to all you early pullers who would "cheat" a hunt out of a good fight, and players of their hunt! XD

Also possible that hunts would have as much variety as "fates". E.g. It might start running and relocating, changing fighting style as it went, calling for reinforcements, prompting some both scripted and non-scripted semi-randomized generated events, etc. just stuff to make it more "fun". And enjoyable. And maybe draw out the length a bit so even if it was early pulled players would still be able to join it as it went through its phases. At this stage, we can imagine the hunt would not just adjust its "difficulty" based on some pointers, but also its behaviour. From being aggressive to being tricky, or even cowardly. Even more personality and character than minions. So truly, dynamic hunts. (Which would make for a nice minion drop too, after the hunt has had its fun, players have had their fun, the hunt got to express its personality, got a very good and big fight, and is happy, and would thus have a higher chance of dropping an equally dynamic, detailed, and full of personality minion version of itself XD to the players as a reward.)(Please SE, take my money. I don't care about epic dark souls bosses, I don't care about monster hunter, I don't care about hi-def hi-res FF15 monsters. I want to hunt in big fun hunts with friends and other people, without toxicity. I'll throw my money at you if you can make something like that. I think others will too, for these open-world open-stage encounters of pure fun.)

And also as Sandpark pointed out, more fun in triggering conditions would be nice too. Think multi-staged spawns requiring players to go across the whole map and engage in mechanics to "activate" the hunt. Currently, pre-pull mechanics only go as far as "check hunt tracker, find hunt, use hunt macro to spam a dozen channels, make a party and play around with silly emotes while people get here." Which is not bad, but there is so much room for improvement. So much potential for this game ... to become a pillar of MMO design, to be able to eclipse whole games dedicated to a specific theme, by just having it as a mere feature in our game ... to become unarguably the best consumer choice there is, generally. But here I am starting to go off at it again xD better stop before I say something silly that'll make me facepalm tomorrow. But before that, life, LIFE, my friends, the ultimate goal of creation, to breathe life into our works, to have these hunts show life, LIFE! =D LIFE!!!