With all this talk about bosses being too difficult for solo players, is it time for Klei to add health scaling based on the number of players?

[Yuuko]

2 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

But with DST, is it REALLY considered as “Fun” to Self-Automate a key boss fight like that?

As someone who plays a lot of roguelikes,

Yes, it is.

Glad we could clear that up.  /thread

2 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

Cause ima be reallll honest- If I gathered a bunch of artifacts, upgraded all my gear as high as I could, fought.. died to, fought again, finally learned a bosses attack patterns- And THEN someone discovers that dashing past the boss and attacking the wall behind him let’s you glitch through the map and the boss falls into lava for an instant kill will make gathering all that other stuff and preparing Irrelevant.

2 hours ago, EatenCheetos said:

If you want to talk about ruining fun, I’ll tell you what ruins mine: looking up tutorials and guides only to see that the best way is to cheese something. Not only do we lose actual guide information via opportunity cost, but doing that thing is going to make me feel like I’m wasting my time & resources.

Ya know what is really interesting?  The fact that BOTH can exist.  There are both 100% and any% speedrun categories because people are interesting in both.  People will play whichever one they want.  The existence of an exploit isn't really an issue unless it is unavoidable.  If people don't want to wall clip or warp in Mario 1 speedrun they just don't...  and they get credit for the extra effort it takes to do such a thing.

One of my favorite categories is lowest% because sometimes it takes a lot of extra effort and creativity to skip more of the game, and the run can be far slower than either any% or 100%.

There are guides to every boss in DST both with and without exploits.  Nothing stops people from completing the fight in whichever way they choose.

[Cassielu]

No.

Health in DST is not just about the progress bar for the player to defeat the boss, they also affect many other things, such as the interaction between mobs, the number of weapon attacks, Wigfird health recovery, and so on. None of this should change with the number of players.

[Uedo]

On 3/28/2024 at 7:22 AM, Mike23Ua said:

Yeah maybe, but what does that say about the rest of the game as a whole.. if boss fights are the main focus?

That's not true Mike, if you removed the bosses you would be left with a lot of game still. 
If you removed the survival elements (you'd need HP obvs), it still wouldn't be a boss focused game.

18 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

As someone who plays a lot of RogueLites/likes one of the main attractions of that particular genre of video game is it Boss Fights, and you will be doing these boss fights on Repeat with each and every run attempt..

But with DST, is it REALLY considered as “Fun” to Self-Automate a key boss fight like that? I mean it’s literally like asking the devs to put in a toggle setting so the game plays itself and you can just watch, maybe hop in and take control after it auto skips the parts you can’t or don’t want to play yourself?

but can anyone actually call that “Fun”? Could you imagine how much “fun” I would have if the key bosses laying at the end of every dungeon in every RogueLite game to ever exist had some sort of super cheap exploitive bug that let me skip actually fighting the boss?

People who are Auto-Mating these fights are doing so not to save “Time” but to save “Resources” they don’t have to bring X,Y,Z items to the fight with them- Because they have no intentions of engaging with the fights intended mechanics.

You’re not going to bring along the required armor, healing supplies & weapons- When you can bug out the game and trick the boss into skipping animations and phases it otherwise would’ve went through normally.

So let’s be logical here… is this “Fun?”

Cause ima be reallll honest- If I gathered a bunch of artifacts, upgraded all my gear as high as I could, fought.. died to, fought again, finally learned a bosses attack patterns- And THEN someone discovers that dashing past the boss and attacking the wall behind him let’s you glitch through the map and the boss falls into lava for an instant kill will make gathering all that other stuff and preparing Irrelevant.

So in conclusion: Your cheese isn’t “Fun” and yes it does indeed break the game & the way your intended to play it.

Now rather or not Klei is brave enough to firmly stand by removing it, or if they cave to peer pressure and revert it bringing back the exploit- That remains to be seen.

But facts are facts- I wouldn’t spend hours grinding out resources to fight an end of dungeon boss in a RogueLite, if there was a cheap method that didn’t even require me to gather artifacts & upgrade my gear.

And That… obviously breaks the game.

If it's objectively not fun, how are people still finding it fun? 

Mike I assure you, many people play roguelikes - my favourite genre myself! Played tons of them, even ones you think you're the only one to have played. 
People don't bring them up often cause of how unlike DST they are, you should pick up on that.

Edit: Also, are people playing roguelikes cause they're excited to fight the same boss over and over again? A lot of roguelikes get criticised if that's the case, people want the meta-progression that comes along side it and the expectation that bosses will get harder or have harder variants. The idea is not that you fight the same thing in different ways and you're so hyped cause your build will make things seem 'wacky', it's, ideally, the ability to beat the boss and move on? - To further difficulty, zones, unlocks, variants. No, not doing the same thing over and over.

[Mike23Ua]

I think that adding various difficulty adjustment toggles (the same way players can toggle to take 40% less or 40% more damage or choose how fast/Slow you freeze, over heat or rather or not it has any effect on you at all) would be a massive step in the right direction.

You see it here all over these forums some people cry “Sandbox” others say “Survival” and there’s still the few whispering “Uncompromising” 

But the magic & beauty of DST is it can be all of these things, or none of these things..

And I’ll be the first to admit that any time Klei releases a limited time game mode event (such as Year of Or Midsummers Cawnival) I will intentionally alter world settings to remove any and every feature that’s going to interfere with experiencing that limited time content (Aka if I just want to play Cawnival mini games I’ll toggle off summer, winter, hound waves, Deerclops etc…)

And on the flip side if I want a brutally uncompromising experience, I can now adjust settings for things like 40% more damage from all sources, Wildfires and lightning strikes happening more often and much more frequently (lightning tuned to more is pure hell BtW lol..) I can EVEN toggle settings so my world gets instantly deleted the moment I croak over dead, and if my way of dealing with Summer was to simply not deal with summer by ducking down into caves… I can now also toggle Summer to last 24/7 non-stop AND I can disable caves from spawning in my world forcing me to deal with Summer on the Surface.

My point as you can plainly see from this detailed post is that DST has the luxury of being as easy or as hard as you personally feel like playing it at the time…

And I just deeply wish Klei would see this, take note of it and then turn DST into a global phenomenon- Not by being uncompromising, or by being the best farming simulator ever…. But by being flexible enough to be thoroughly enjoyable to players of various playstyles and preferences.

And I KNOW this sounds like I’m asking too much, but then Klei only needs look at their large and continuing to expand cast of playable characters, to see all the work they’ve already done.

[Uedo]

8 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

I think that adding various difficulty adjustment toggles (the same way players can toggle to take 40% less or 40% more damage or choose how fast/Slow you freeze, over heat or rather or not it has any effect on you at all) would be a massive step in the right direction.

You see it here all over these forums some people cry “Sandbox” others say “Survival” and there’s still the few whispering “Uncompromising” 

But the magic & beauty of DST is it can be all of these things, or none of these things..

And I’ll be the first to admit that any time Klei releases a limited time game mode event (such as Year of Or Midsummers Cawnival) I will intentionally alter world settings to remove any and every feature that’s going to interfere with experiencing that limited time content (Aka if I just want to play Cawnival mini games I’ll toggle off summer, winter, hound waves, Deerclops etc…)

And on the flip side if I want a brutally uncompromising experience, I can now adjust settings for things like 40% more damage from all sources, Wildfires and lightning strikes happening more often and much more frequently (lightning tuned to more is pure hell BtW lol..) I can EVEN toggle settings so my world gets instantly deleted the moment I croak over dead, and if my way of dealing with Summer was to simply not deal with summer by ducking down into caves… I can now also toggle Summer to last 24/7 non-stop AND I can disable caves from spawning in my world forcing me to deal with Summer on the Surface.

My point as you can plainly see from this detailed post is that DST has the luxury of being as easy or as hard as you personally feel like playing it at the time…

And I just deeply wish Klei would see this, take note of it and then turn DST into a global phenomenon- Not by being uncompromising, or by being the best farming simulator ever…. But by being flexible enough to be thoroughly enjoyable to players of various playstyles and preferences.

And I KNOW this sounds like I’m asking too much, but then Klei only needs look at their large and continuing to expand cast of playable characters, to see all the work they’ve already done.

They have toggles already - The fact you can eliminate danger from your world would be testament to this.

No more new playable characters for a while please.

Summer is fine to deal with with or without caves, likewise with lightning.

You can't cater to everyone, nor should you, things become diffuse then.

[Squidyfoo]

I'm going to respond to the original post. I definitely think this should be a thing, or at least an option. The reason that some of my friends left Don't Starve was because of the scaling so I think this would be awesome. I could see a toggle that could be turned on or off in the game settings or something. Also I don't think they would necessarily have to have their solo player health when they are scaled for one person or whatever. Maybe even configure options for configuring boss health to insane. They could do some cool stuff, and this would honestly be my most requested feature.

[Mike23Ua]

5 hours ago, Uedo said:

They have toggles already - The fact you can eliminate danger from your world would be testament to this.

No more new playable characters for a while please.

Summer is fine to deal with with or without caves, likewise with lightning.

You can't cater to everyone, nor should you, things become diffuse then.

Actually they can cater to everyone, it would ultimately just depend on how well Klei actually handles that.

I know that originally they were a small indie development team, but I do recall them saying something sometime back ago about selling majority shares to Tencent which was meant to help them get monies to hire more devs (which they have with folks like Zarklord) I don’t know all the devs here so I’m not entirely sure how many they’re are, but I do know that if Klei decided that they wanted to try to actually do various different game playstyles and player playing preferences that they could hire a particular “team” of devs to work on that project while the other devs work remain on mostly unscathed (of course they’ll have to share ideas and stuff and make sure no serious game breaking bugs arise but you get the idea..)

If Klei wants to actually further develop lights out mode into being like it’s on actual different mode (new types of mobs, world behaviors etc..) they could tackle that, while the devs wanting to do some harder content can focus on “DST Hardcore Mode”

If they wanna get a team together to re-Introduce the gorge and the forge events they’ll hire people and assign groups who are passionate about working on that particular project.

Just like if Klei were to decide you know what we got a game with a bunch of weapons and tools and body amulets, we could easily turn this into a traditional RogueLite- They wouldn’t use the same developers who are currently working on the core content updates, they’d hire people passionate about creating a fully fleshed out RogueLite mode offering. And if I knew lick about computer design or programming I’d be one of the first in line to offer to help with that particular mode.

If they wanted to hire a team to bring something similar to Minecrafts Creative mode into DST then they’ll hire people dedicated to a Creative sandbox building experience, and maybe the game can even behave in ways that in other modes.. it otherwise would not.. 

Anyway before I turn this into a massively off topic TL:DR I’ll just get to my point, if Klei wanted to offer up actual player based enemy scaling (similar to borderlands or TMNT shredders revenge) then they will hire a group of devs for each experience.

Aka- “How can we make this easier and more enjoyable for a player who chooses to tackle this content by themselves?”

And another team for “How do we make this a viable challenge that isn’t completely cakewalked through when your playing in a group of 3 or more?”

And each of those “Teams” can come up with new ideas…

Such as for example: an actual Cooperative boss fight experience with Malbatross where she swoops in and snatched up a player and the other players have to rescue the captive player, obviously in solo mode a move like this would be game ending.. so she’d need to behave differently.

Of course I can only assume, I have no clue if what I’m saying holds any merit or not.

[Cheggf]

On 3/31/2024 at 9:50 AM, Squidyfoo said:

I'm going to respond to the original post. I definitely think this should be a thing, or at least an option. The reason that some of my friends left Don't Starve was because of the scaling so I think this would be awesome. I could see a toggle that could be turned on or off in the game settings or something. Also I don't think they would necessarily have to have their solo player health when they are scaled for one person or whatever. Maybe even configure options for configuring boss health to insane. They could do some cool stuff, and this would honestly be my most requested feature.

It is already an option. If you use characters with higher damage multipliers like Wolfgang, use better weapons, use followers, use traps, use automated weapons like catapults, or use buffs like VGCF, the boss' health will be scaled lower. If you use characters with worse damage multipliers like Wes or use worse weapons the boss' health will be scaled higher.

[eternalLocket]

I am against official scaling. The game isn't meant to be for solo players. I'd rather the focus stay on group play. There are plenty of options to make fighting bosses easier for both group and solo players. It's just a matter of how much effort you want to put in to make it happen. Not to mention mods exist.

[comonavi]

I'm fine with the boss difficulty in singleplayer, most are pretty easy with enough practice. I sometimes wish they were a little tankier with two or more players but some already do this in more creative ways like Klaus' spells or Toadstool's AOE

[benfroyobro9381]

7 hours ago, eternalLocket said:

I am against official scaling. The game isn't meant to be for solo players. I'd rather the focus stay on group play. There are plenty of options to make fighting bosses easier for both group and solo players. It's just a matter of how much effort you want to put in to make it happen. Not to mention mods exist.

Mods existing should rarely if ever justify a flaw in the game. Not all players have access to mods and if you need to directly change the game to improve your experience then that implies the game is flawed. Just because the game isn't meant for solo play doesn't mean it can't be accomodated. There's no no harm in having more options. Just have boss scaling be a world setting or something. 

[Uedo]

15 hours ago, benfroyobro9381 said:

Mods existing should rarely if ever justify a flaw in the game. Not all players have access to mods and if you need to directly change the game to improve your experience then that implies the game is flawed. Just because the game isn't meant for solo play doesn't mean it can't be accomodated. There's no no harm in having more options. Just have boss scaling be a world setting or something. 

I think they're saying they don't view it as a flaw, its fine. Mods don't justify it, mods will allow you to give yourself a handicap if you're struggling.

[Mike23Ua]

On 5/6/2024 at 12:17 PM, eternalLocket said:

I am against official scaling. The game isn't meant to be for solo players. I'd rather the focus stay on group play. There are plenty of options to make fighting bosses easier for both group and solo players. It's just a matter of how much effort you want to put in to make it happen. Not to mention mods exist.

Wait hold on, so your telling me in a recent update Klei added a world Gen option to have your world instantly deleted upon death just like in Solo Dont Starve, but yet the rest of the game still has to be scaled to multiplayer just because lol it’s a multiplayer game??

I think Klei probably needs to look into not just boss scaling but also world content scaling….

And this means that the world sizes and food and resources spawn to accommodate 6 players, so if you’re playing alone or with 2-3 people there’s an over abundance of food/resource supplies.

To truly understand what the differences between DS and DST are (outside of ridiculously higher enemy health stats) one would need to play Solo Don’t Starve.

I am not at all ashamed to admit that I have on several occasions in fact actually starved to death in Solo DS, or ran out of resources to craft a torch, or ended up stranded out at sea with a degrading boat I could not repair in Shipwrecked..

I don’t think I have EVER managed to starve to death in DST or run out of resources to craft a torch… because the game and it’s resources are scaled for multiple players and anything less than that is an over abundance of resources.

Yet…. There’s still now a world Gen option to like Solo mode instantly erase your world the moment you croak.

I think it’s pretty fair for me to want changes to bosses to accommodate for this.

We can increase damage taken from all sources to 40% more or decrease them to 40% less..

But I think what Klei REALLY needs to do is add more options here… maybe for example I want to take 100% damage and die instantly if a boss hits me….

But I do not want to take 100% more damage from Freezing/Overheating.

And IF I could change a boss to dealing 100% instant killing damage, obviously I’d also want options to lower its health so it isn’t a grueling hour long fight.

In short: I want more immediate danger, but I want to be able to reasonably adjust the difficulty of that more immediate danger.

And since Klei has already added options for 40% less or more damage taken from all sources, and an instant world deletion upon player death, then I logically don’t see why they CANT add more options for things like boss difficulty or health scaling.

I’ll repeat this sentence over and over again until I either get banned of these forums cause the devs got sick of hearing it, OR they actually take it to heart.

”In a game already full options, we really do need more options.”

[lowercase skye]

1 hour ago, Mike23Ua said:

I am not at all ashamed to admit that I have on several occasions in fact actually starved to death in Solo DS, or ran out of resources to craft a torch, or ended up stranded out at sea with a degrading boat I could not repair in Shipwrecked..

I don’t think I have EVER managed to starve to death in DST or run out of resources to craft a torch… because the game and it’s resources are scaled for multiple players and anything less than that is an over abundance of resources.

This isn't a result of the lack of resources, I used to religiously play DS and call DST easier for this exact same reason... and eventually realized that I was pretty much always hovering at 20-30 grass/twigs at all times in either game. Dying more often in DS is because of many other factors, such as small engine/world gen differences or literally all of the shipwrecked DLC in your third example there.

[Uedo]

20 hours ago, Mike23Ua said:

”In a game already full options, we really do need more options.”

I'll say mine too. 

"In a game already full of options, I should put my suggestions in the appropriate sub-forum"

[paodocevoante1]

On 5/7/2024 at 3:18 PM, Mike23Ua said:

 

I don’t think I have EVER managed to starve to death in DST or run out of resources to craft a torch… because the game and it’s resources are scaled for multiple players and anything less than that is an over abundance of resources.

 

Congratulations to you, several beginners or even intermediate people don't know where to look for food/resources or end up being clumsy and forget to pick up stick and grass to make the torch and die for the night

[Ardcrumb]

Once again reminding people that most players don't know all the hidden details of fighting bosses, and to a new player, the health can be seen as just a slog to get through, or just makes it artificially difficult.