Avatar’s Update #383: Play Release 78 Now! Dynamically Scaled Difficulty! Shadow Creatures Preview!

I totally missed that it a test project! Sorry for that. This has been semi implemented in live??? Oh my.
To come back at your QA comments, this is what happens when the testers have the feeling they are being ignored while doing the bug reports.

 

Yeah, sometimes I wonder. I have not been particularly kind over the last two years, but I always want to give the team the benefit of the doubt. It's a small team, small player base, I can't reasonably expect this to be ESO. And just because I think something should be maybe easy to implement, that doesn't mean it actually is. (I do product design, and many many times people have asked for a "simple" change and then get annoyed when I explain how difficult and involved that change actually is.) But then, when there are routine failures to implement really simple stuff, I'm at a loss. The players that are really into this game would gladly be free QA testers if they got some decent rewards out of it. Maybe Shroud can't do ESO-level tech, but they should be knocking it out of the park on story elements. Instead, we get scenes with empty houses, no sense of hwy anything is where it is, who built it, and a world with no sense of history. (I mean, yeah, it's only 500ish years since the cataclysm, but that's plenty of time to have some history and world building.) If you're gonna dump a giant ruin/city/satyr-controlled market/ancient battlefield/massive monument in the middle of nowhere, give us some friggin' clues as to why/how/who. The recent Bunker C quest was kinda silly (I really hate quests where you do them, and then the quest giver tells you what a fool you were for doing it without giving you the opportunity to figure out you're being scammed and end the quest a different way) but the Bunker C scene was FANTASTIC. It had reasons why it was there. It had links to other mysterious things in the game. It had all the little things that make playing games like this intriguing and fun. (Mad mad props to Sannio on this. I wish he had the time to spend one day per release adding in little world details to existing scenes.)

I don't know. They've made a few changes/additions recently that I've really liked, but it still seems over all they dropped the ball and are scrambling around trying to pick it up.

 

XP is scaling now. At least, from normal to hard. Skeletons drop about 4k in Easy, and about 13k in Normal.

 

Sweet. Once they get loot scaling then it might be worth grinding there.

 

Maybe. The scene is a little light on mobs. When this tech gets put into other denser scenes, it'll be a bigger deal.

 

My understanding from the release notes was that this first scaling difficulty zone was to be a test and that xp and loot would be adjusted later on, so that in the future the xp/loot would scale with the difficulty selected. Currently, it's all the same no matter what difficulty you choose.

 

XP is scaling. Loot is not.

 

They are nailing down the XP scaling before doing any loot adjustments.

 

I'm excited for this, I hope they can retrofit it to other scenes easily. Some really pretty t2-t3 scenes I'd love to have reason to stomp around in again.

 

And, it appears Ferocious Razorbacks in Extreme are dropping 280k xp.