[Sept 18] Difficulty and Level Progression

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Sickness wrote:

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Antilurker77 wrote:

Just make separate leagues with fixed difficulty settings, this way ladders stay separate and the system becomes impossible to abuse.

If there is no way to transfer characters and your stash from the lower difficulty league to the higher difficulty leagues then that will be a rather bad system.
It's reasonable to think that alot of players will start playing on the lower difficulty league (if not, then it's rather pointless in the first place) and that they will eventually learn the game, learn to make a good build and collect good gear.
At that point the lower difficulty will not be approprietly challenging for them anymore, and it would really suck if they had to give up their characters and all the loot they had collected just to be able to play on a difficulty that is not trivial for them.

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wyldmage wrote:

Except that if you take all that gear, all your characters are twinked out.
And thus the increased difficulty is still not difficult.

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wyldmage wrote:

Whereas if they have to roll new characters, it IS difficult, as intended.

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Sickness wrote:

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wyldmage wrote:

Except that if you take all that gear, all your characters are twinked out.
And thus the increased difficulty is still not difficult.

Do you still not understand that it depends entierly on how much the different factors affects the difficulty?

And even then, it will still be more difficult.

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wyldmage wrote:

Whereas if they have to roll new characters, it IS difficult, as intended.

Why should the difficulty system work directy AGAINST the RPG part of the game?
That just seems like extremely poor game design.

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wyldmage wrote:

GGG *want* you to re-roll characters.
It actually IS part of the game design.

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RandomOugi wrote:

I got tired of reading the unpleasantly heated discussion by page 9 and skipped straight to this reply, so please warn me if this idea has already been presented.

A way to introduce extra difficulty to the game that's also rewarding in a way that fits PoE's philosophy is to itemize it.

Add random traits, uniques and maybe even skill gems and passives that debuff your character but provide extra experience and drop bonuses, these would probably have to be restricted to debuffs and bonuses applied to your own character in the context of parties, to simplify balancing and avoid inconveniencing others.

This approach eliminates exploits because "abusing" such equipment/skills would be the same as abusing good drops or planning a specialized build.

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Sickness wrote:

However, every argument concerning ladder disruption can be made against it.

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RandomOugi wrote:

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Sickness wrote:

However, every argument concerning ladder disruption can be made against it.

I can actually see it affecting ladders positively in the sense that it's another factor that would influence specially the players fighting for the top spots aiming for the main objective of fast leveling.

Considering they would probably have very low effects in terms of +%, top players would trade the best items furiously and would have to consider play style changes depending on the debuff(damage, elemental resistance, defense, stats, recovery, etc.) and question whether the bonus to exp gain would actually help instead of hindering leveling because of turning the character less effective...

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Sickness wrote:

I agree. Being able to select difficulty level would have that effect aswell.

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RandomOugi wrote:

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Sickness wrote:

I agree. Being able to select difficulty level would have that effect aswell.

I disagree with you on that point because I feel a difficulty selection would be too "flat" for the exp ladders; any decent competing player would play on the best difficulty for experience (probably the hardest).

If implemented like now, players could easily adapt to the harder difficulties because they would be very predictable, and if instead of giving a simple diff selection they gave players control over specific monster parameters in exchange for a exp bonus, it would be more intrusive and exploitable.