0.550 and up: concerns about future of AVWW

[keith.lamothe]

The only way I can see world-map movement costing something would be to limit the distance you can move from a settlement, somewhat similar to how fuel cells limited how far you could travel in Master of Orion 2.  So if I had 4 Food, I could move 4 spaces.  I'm not consuming the food, it just is an indicator of the area around my settlement I can travel to.  Some terrain types might have increased costs, and some, like desert, might require 2 Water in addition.  I'd imagine these wouldn't be something you carried with you even, but rather an upgrade you applied to your settlement so it would affect all players in MP, and each time you got a new settlement you'd need to upgrade it to increase the area around it you can explore.

Personally I would like something like that but it's totally at odds with the way the world is generated right now.  One of two things would be true at any given point:

1) Your "fuel range" lets you get to the part of the continent that's within your level range (+/- 2), and thus it's basically irrelevant to the gameplay (which is tolerable if it's aesthetically pleasing, but I've also found confusion among players when stuff doesn't tightly integrate with the gameplay).

Or:

2) Your "fuel range" stops short of the regions that are actually in your level range, and you can't really get anything done.

[keith.lamothe]

From another angle: think about the difference in "how hard is this" when moving from place to place.  In Morrowind/Diablo-2/etc there can be some pretty significant differences there, but generally it was pretty gradual and it took a fairly long time of just walking to get from "the area I should be able to do well in" to "the area where I will be unconditionally stomped".  So if some factor makes it so that "you can go this far, no farther, until you get X", it's not a game-breaker. In AVWW you can easily have two regions adjacent to each other with a 5 level difference (or more).  That's something like a 500% (or 1600%, I forget) harder region.  Something that causes you to have access to one of those regions and not the others is rather a big difference.

Anyway, I'm not trying to hammer this into the ground or whatever: I want y'all to understand why it is the current design doesn't really support such mechanisms.  Certainly bigger things have changed about the game but it would take some pretty big changes to make it possible and it's not at all clear that such changes would be a net-gain for the game, and in any event we need to get the things _currently_ undergoing massive overhaul to a relatively stable state so you can re-evaluate the game before serious consideration of further overhauls would be based on any kind of wisdom.

So keep thinking

[TechSY730]

Speaking of "smoothness" of difficulty, isn't one level above being twice a difficult a bit too steep? This could easily lead to circumstances where playing on your own level is too easy, but one level above is too hard. Sure, fiddling with the difficulty level could help ease this, but I wouldn't want to change from normal to easy difficulty every-time I wanted to be a little more adventurous but still live. How about something more gradual like 1.5x as difficult and continue on from there?

[x4000]

Speaking of "smoothness" of difficulty, isn't one level above being twice a difficult a bit too steep? This could easily lead to circumstances where playing on your own level is too easy, but one level above is too hard. Sure, fiddling with the difficulty level could help ease this, but I wouldn't want to change from normal to easy difficulty every-time I wanted to be a little more adventurous but still live. How about something more gradual like 1.5x as difficult and continue on from there?

It has to do with how we're planning to balance the missions.  I'm not really willing to discuss it until people can see it in practice (after which I'll be all ears for feedback).

[TechSY730]

Speaking of "smoothness" of difficulty, isn't one level above being twice a difficult a bit too steep? This could easily lead to circumstances where playing on your own level is too easy, but one level above is too hard. Sure, fiddling with the difficulty level could help ease this, but I wouldn't want to change from normal to easy difficulty every-time I wanted to be a little more adventurous but still live. How about something more gradual like 1.5x as difficult and continue on from there?

It has to do with how we're planning to balance the missions.  I'm not really willing to discuss it until people can see it in practice (after which I'll be all ears for feedback).

OK. I'll wait until some of the other stuff gets implemented. If it still feels to steep after that, I'll mention this again.

[x4000]

Absolutely.

[zebramatt]

Speaking of "smoothness" of difficulty, isn't one level above being twice a difficult a bit too steep? This could easily lead to circumstances where playing on your own level is too easy, but one level above is too hard. Sure, fiddling with the difficulty level could help ease this, but I wouldn't want to change from normal to easy difficulty every-time I wanted to be a little more adventurous but still live. How about something more gradual like 1.5x as difficult and continue on from there?

The difficulty is (totally understandably) rather out of whack at the moment, anyway. I'd say same-level regions are feeling twice or two-and-a-half times as difficult (to pull a number out of the air) as they might feel once all the elements have started to balance a little better - so one level up right now is four or five times as difficult as it might otherwise be, rather than 2x.

[x4000]

That's also definitely true.