Would Power Scaling Be Good For The Game?

[SnoByrd]

Would it be healthy if the game increased in difficulty for every survivor? I feel like it gets too easy if there's more than three people per world, especially if everyone has mics and can coordinate. And if people want to chill when they play with their friends, perhaps there could be an option in the menu to turn it off. What do you guys think?

[kiwikenobi]

I think it would be nice if bosses had less HP when only one person is playing. If larger groups of people feel like the bosses are too easy, then having the option to make them stronger sounds good, too. My experience is of playing alone most of the time, and I'm rarely able to defeat the bosses by myself, so that's my perspective on it.

Perhaps you had other ideas of what increased difficulty means, though. My immediate thought was boss HP, but maybe you have other ideas?

[SnoByrd]

4 minutes ago, kiwikenobi said:

I think it would be nice if bosses had less HP when only one person is playing. If larger groups of people feel like the bosses are too easy, then having the option to make them stronger sounds good, too. My experience is of playing alone most of the time, and I'm rarely able to defeat the bosses by myself, so that's my perspective on it.

Perhaps you had other ideas of what increased difficulty means, though. My immediate thought was boss HP, but maybe you have other ideas?

Boss HP and Mob damage mostly. Maybe the rate at which food is accessible via berry bushes, crop growth, and dirt piles are spawned is slower. Definitely not at the rate of Hardmode though. 

[Cheggf]

I think adding mechanics to bosses to discourage tank n spank would be a much more interesting solution to stacking players making the fights easy than simply bloating the numbers up so the tank n spank takes longer.

[Fill-Lips]

Hound attack waves and cave worm attack waves kinda do this, scaling up in numbers the longer you've survived, so I'd imagine they could add another thing or two that also scales in days.

I wouldn't really know what they could add though.

[Owlrust]

Isn't that why a lot of enemies have increased health and damage compared to their single-player counterparts? MacTusk and Merms have double the health of what they used to, and you see that scale with bosses too (such as Bearger and Deerclops, especially Dragonfly).

[Duck986]

Well, we have the mod which is doing something like that, but I want to see this as an official configurable feature, too. Like, before generating the world you can choose - will enemies scale their stats according to players quantity, or they will be constant like we have now.

Because 3+ players coop is still OP right now, duh.

[Mike23Ua]

The enemies in DST do have higher health and damage thresholds then their Solo counter parts, But they aren’t the only things that get more powerful-

Thermal Stones take forever to go cold, there’s a multitude of ways to revive & heal, each character rework is bringing brand new abilities that help characters more easily survive alone Willow & Bernie, Wigfrid and Weaponized Warble, Wendy & Ectoherbology, I don’t think the mobs in DST NEED any balance changes- Especially with weapons and armor becoming easier to craft by lowering the ingredients required in getting them and boosting their usefulness

Rabbit Earmuffs no longer needing to be researched at Science Machine, Bat Bat reduced crafting cost + increase drop rate of bat wings, Marble Armor now only needing 6 Marbles and 2 ropes to easily craft one of the most OP armor in the game

You guys don’t see it- but the changes Klei has been making has been making things that used to be balanced around multiple players, significantly easier.

However the bosses in the game I wish could be scaled by how many players are playing being easier with less and harder with more players involved.

[ShadowDuelist]

This should be an optional configuration of the server.

Unexperienced public server attendants sometimes kick people for really weird, narrow minded and uninformed reasons. If the hive mind of pubs knows that "more people increases difficulty", I can see it being an excuse for them to kick newcomers all the time making public servers a 3 or 4 people exclusive club.

Also my experience on really crowded servers (I host a public server which has on average 7-12 people in, most of the day) Is that while as it is right now, the bosses difficulty scales down the more people are in, also starvation, lack of resources to survive winter/summer, massive hound waves, and involuntary griefing, become a stronger threat the more people are in (If most are not advanced players).

Advanced players can also create more food than they can possibly eat regardless of how many are on the server, and would not get fun out of longer fights against more HP enemies. So the difficulty for more people should lie somewhere else IMHO.

[Captain_Rage]

Adding more enemies in certain encounters depending on the number of players can arguably work and add to the challenge but slapping on more HP on bosses sounds like horrible concept, especially in this game. @ShadowDuelist already pointed out very valid concerns why the latter is not a good idea to begin with.

[SnoByrd]

3 hours ago, Captain_Rage said:

Adding more enemies in certain encounters depending on the number of players can arguably work and add to the challenge but slapping on more HP on bosses sounds like horrible concept, especially in this game. @ShadowDuelist already pointed out very valid concerns why the latter is not a good idea to begin with.

Yeah, that makes sense now that you point it out. Increasing enemy spawn rate in certain encounters sounds like a good idea though. Would food scarcity be a good option?

[Anomen77]

On 12/22/2020 at 6:31 PM, SnoByrd said:

Would food scarcity be a good option?

Food scarcity is already a thing. Natural resources are limited and the more players there are the less food each one gets. Although, the 'Reap What You Sow' update completely negates this by allowing you to get as many giant crops as you want with near zero resource requirements.

If you want to increase difficulty you could always put natural resources to 'Less' in world gen or install some difficulty mods to spice things up. There's some really great ones out there with tons of new mechanics instead of just more boss health and less food.