What Am I Missing?

[TechSY730]

Even having a slight increase of spawn monsters and them having 1.25 more health would be effective maybe since it will mean more things you need to shoot at together? I dunno, just doubling it seems to be more effort if you both aint shooting at the same thing.

You're assuming two players -- and that spawning more monsters would actually work (it wouldn't, often).  Generally speaking if you had, say, 8 players and 8x as many monsters then you would find it unplayable.  Or pick your numbers, it just simply doesn't scale.

Regarding monsters taking longer to kill in MP, that's simply not true.  Simple math:
- If player A does 1 unit of damage, and monsters X and Y have 2 units of health each, then in solo it takes player A 4 shots to kill them all.  So, 4 shots per player, since there's one player.
- If players A and B both do 1 unit of damage, and monsters X and Y have 4 units of health each (thanks to MP buff), then takes the players 8 shots to kill them all.  So, once again, 4 shots per player.

If players split up and fight different monsters in the same chunk, then yeah it takes twice as long to kill each one with two players; but the number of shots fired to clear the chunk remains the same.  It's possible we might do some sub-linear scaling of monster health in the future, but that's more a matter of simply having to cave to very wrong perceptions that people have rather than any basis in real balance.

The simple fact is that having a friend helps enormously already, even with perfectly linear scaling (common misconception of "why have the friend there at all").  If you and your friend stand right on top of each other, then both of you can be hit by enemy shots, sure.  But otherwise the enemy can only shoot at one of you (or the chasing enemies can only chase one of you, etc).  You can flank enemies and shoot them from multiple directions, and ultimately overwhelm them if you play your cards right.

So you wind up getting into extreme "takes much less damage" situations even if you're good about it.

Perception matters, obviously.  But in this case people's perceptions about the math of it are woefully incorrect and that kind of saddens me; it's so well balanced right now, but people are rejecting it because of doing bad math.

Yes, balance scales perfectly, but "fun factor" may not for all people. Although fighting half as many monsters, each at 2x health may be (near) equivalent from a balance standpoint, it is not always the same from a "fun" standpoint.

Now this is where it gets tricky. Some people like fighting small numbers of durable enemies. Others like fighting more monsters of normal durability enemies. This may be one of those "you can't please them all" and have to choose the one less people will complain about (or take a compromise, like sub-linear scaling).
Or do something clever to mix all this up, like have some monster types vary numbers based on number of players, some monsters types vary health based on number of players, some monster types do a bit of both based on number of players, and a few monster types not scale at all based on number of enemies.

[MouldyK]

No, no. I understand it completely and really I don't have an iddue if it takes longer to kill something because someone else is in the chunk.

Overall, each person is still firing the same amount of shots in MP to kill things that they would in Solo-Play IF they work at the same pace.


However, you do have those people who are happily one-hitting things, then get annoyed when everything takes two or three hits to kill because more more have entered the chunk.

You also get the people who have different play styles, like one may like to take things slow and attack things, while others may want to just rush and kill everything on sight. The people rushing might get annoyed that the other people are not being as fast as they are and so may feel like they are doing all the work and that the other people are to blame for things taking longer.


Maybe it's less doing bad-math and more about people thinking that more players in the chunk is only good when everyone is doing their fair share of the kills? Having hopped in a multiplayer game once with 4 other people, i've heard a comment being made about how someone was in the chunk for no reason as they were not killing fast enough for other people. :/

[LayZboy]

You can flank enemies and shoot them from multiple directions, and ultimately overwhelm them if you play your cards right.

Good luck trying to do that in any area with small corridors (which is like half the game).

[x4000]

It's a tricky sort of thing.  But I will also say this: there's a linear cost in MP to having more monsters in a chunk when you are on a server.  Things will get progressively more laggy if there are tons of players in a chunk and tons of monsters.  If we were capping this to 2 players that would be easy to balance around, but as it stands adding more enemies in MP is a Really Bad Idea (tm) as it will just worsen the experience from a technical standpoint.  That pretty much means your choice is one of two things, period:

1. Enemies don't scale much or at all, and the more people you have the easier you steamroll everything.  Which leads to general lack of fun and blazing through continents (which in term then starts hitting other technical constraints if you're literally going through hundreds or thousands of them with a large group of people on a persistent server).

2. The number of enemies is not increased, but some other factor is brought into play to even the tables when many people are in a chunk.

That's pretty much it.  Now we have a current interpretation of #2, and there are certainly others that might be valid, but option 3 of including more monsters really isn't feasible in my mind.

[Martyn van Buren]

How about giving the game a budget per player-in-chunk which it can spend randomly on extra monsters (up to a reasonable hard limit), different monster buffs, and other difficulty-boosting things like extra monster types or microbosses?  Even a random choice between attack and defense buffs might make it more interesting.

[zebramatt]

How about giving the game a budget per player-in-chunk which it can spend randomly on extra monsters (up to a reasonable hard limit), different monster buffs, and other difficulty-boosting things like extra monster types or microbosses?  Even a random choice between attack and defense buffs might make it more interesting.

I quite like the gist of that idea.

[timesend]

Considering the idea of randomly buffing monsters stats etc... Maybe we could have a setting for multiplayer which enabled us to change that. So like one setting, all random stat changes, another setting all higher health. It would also enable multiplayer servers to have a better control of difficulty

[omegajasam]

Multilayer goes a /lot/ faster then single player if everyone splits up, amking for faster progression.

On the current scaling, I have to agree the reasoning is a little flawed. 2 players fighting 2 separate monsters in a chuck results in each of those monsters being threatening for 2X the amount of time. Yes, it take the same number of shots (well, not even that's true, they often take 1 extra) to kill the same number of mobs, but the time is usually more then double, the threat goes up more. It gets worse as you deal with more people, as you find yourself each trying to fight 3 seperate monsters with 3X the health which in the case of mobs like bats, is quite likely to result in a melee hit you wouldn't otherwise.

It is notably easier to do a lot of content solo then together.

I do like the gist of that idea by Martyn. If only because it would have other applications to things other then multiplayer scaling. I think darkspore did this well. If you were in multiplayer you got a few new types of mobs (hoolder type mobs that requires a team mate to rescue you), more 'mini-boss' type mobs with more bonuses, a few more mobs in general and more but not liner health if I recall right.

Alterntivily, reducing the hp scaling a little would work wonders, to take account for the less then perfect efficency of humans and the increased danger of certain mobs that get a lot more deadly 1 on 1 when scaled.