Dungeon Maker - playing as your own character

[Skeez1e]

<p>Took my boxes through the dungeon I'm half done building - 40 mobs at this point; could have easily pulled them all at the same time without breathing hard so scaling definitely needs some looking at.  No experience nor dungeon coins in that setup.</p><p>Took 2 in using avatars -power regen seems to be slower than pre-patch. </p><p>I see the limited spawn tokens are not available any longer - are they going to be available via a chest/body drop fashion?</p><p>On a similar topic: is there a definitive list of spawners somewhere? </p>

[Rothgar]

<p>What level was the dungeon when you ran your normal characters through it?  Also, what is their gear / AA situation?</p><p>The difficulty level could swing wildly between levels, AA and gear.  This is something we will need to work out before we can give rewards for play as your character.</p>

[Skeez1e]

<p>Mobs were even con throughout - I haven't added any agro/strength factors to any of the mobs yet.  Gear is probably as good as it gets on Test - Micki is 40k and change unbuffed, strength 2700, 310 aa, Skeezie about the same. </p><p>It was serious cake. </p>

[Kuulei]

<p>I just tried running Skee's dungeon, as myself, all mobs even but <strong><span style="font-size: x-small;">no experience</span> as they grey out if playing yourself!</strong></p><p>Definitely regen is way slower on power and I run out faster than pre patch with the standard avatars</p><p>I have a fabled one that dropped I am using now, he is not going through as much power it seems, perhaps not all avatars are created equal!</p><p>Regen does seem slower at the end of fights.  If I was using one of the 4 initial avatars, usually pick the assassin as it can do dps and a small 9% heal, he was out of power before the 3rd mob in a group was dead.  I died alot at beginning. So went back to to a fabled avatar and will try and finish what skee has done</p>

[Aethn]

<p>Rothgar, could you add the EXP and TOKENS back in for ppl who use the actual avatars?  I mean thats the intended method atm anyways.</p><p>Its already hard enough to get anything done on the server, now it looks like we wont even get tokens to improve dungeons and buy spawners for a week or two while you test this??</p>

[Skeez1e]

<p>Experience and tokens are still there when you run avatars - it's when you run it as your own character its missing.</p>

[Kuulei]

<p>Rothgar, you have got to come play skee's dungeon, I am cracking up</p>

[Nakaru-Nitepaw]

<p>Confirmed happening on Test_copy. The dungeon "Rawr <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" />" which was packed full of mobs. I didn't recieve any tokens at the end. BTW kudos to the builder of that one. It actually managed to kill my 90 melee warden once lol. Which is almost impossible to do. That room full of gnolls that stun and like to play ratonga football. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" /></p>

[Kuulei]

<p><cite>Rothgar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>What level was the dungeon when you ran your normal characters through it?  Also, what is their gear / AA situation?</p><p>The difficulty level could swing wildly between levels, AA and gear.  This is something we will need to work out before we can give rewards for play as your character.</p></blockquote><p>I think the rewards, if playing yourself, should only be experience.  Dungeon marks should be a bonus for playing as intended, using a provided / dropped / purchased Avatar.</p>

[Rothgar]

<p><cite>Eschia@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Confirmed happening on Test_copy. The dungeon "Rawr <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" />" which was packed full of mobs. I didn't recieve any tokens at the end. BTW kudos to the builder of that one. It actually managed to kill my 90 melee warden once lol. Which is almost impossible to do. That room full of gnolls that stun and like to play ratonga football. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" /></p></blockquote><p>No tokens even when playing as an Avatar?  Tokens should only be disabled if you play as yourself.</p>

[Nakaru-Nitepaw]

<p>I didn't use an avatar. I was playing through as a copy of my 90 Warden from AB. I wasn't aware at the time that it was disabled for real characters. Which to me is disapointing. I hope when everything is fixed we can get tokens for playing our own characters or else I see no point in using them.</p>

[Cyliena]

<p><cite>Eschia@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I didn't use an avatar. I was playing through as a copy of my 90 Warden from AB. I wasn't aware at the time that it was disabled for real characters. Which to me is disapointing. I hope when everything is fixed we can get tokens for playing our own characters or else I see no point in using them.</p></blockquote><p>Pretty sure it's temporary while they balance it all out.</p>

[Finora]

<p>I'm of the opinion the rewards shouldn't vary in the DM when using your avatar. Seems like that would just be unnecessarily complicating things.</p><p>Set it up like it is with the avatars</p><p>I ran through a couple of dungeons on Test with a lvl 42ish melee specced warden (mastercrafted/handcrafted/older quested gear, adept/expert/master spells). The dungeons I went through seemed to scale well for her.  One in particular was a bit more tough due to the sheer numbers of mobs that came at once but it was doable.</p>

[Bobonice]

<p>just ran though rawr(sp?) dungeon with raid geared melee warden.  There wasn't much challenge before in the dungeons i've run and playing as myself took out even the challenge of minimizing the number of mobs pulled at a time.  There is a definate scaling issue.</p>

[Aethn]

<p><cite>Bobonice wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>just ran though rawr(sp?) dungeon with raid geared melee warden.  There wasn't much challenge before in the dungeons i've run and playing as myself took out even the challenge of minimizing the number of mobs pulled at a time.  There is a definate scaling issue.</p></blockquote><p>You are in Raid gear, if SOE makes DM dungeons a challenge for Raid gear players it defeats the entire reason for them.  This is a casual player non-raider feature.  Now at some point SOE might want to look at a flag you can turn on and off for DM's if you chose too, to make them more "Heroic" for raid geared toons that say give 1.5x's the tokens, but making them challenging for a raid geared player right out the gate would be a disaster and create yet another unused game feature since the average player wont be able to beat it reasonably</p>

[Rothgar]

<p><cite>Persyphony@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Bobonice wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>just ran though rawr(sp?) dungeon with raid geared melee warden.  There wasn't much challenge before in the dungeons i've run and playing as myself took out even the challenge of minimizing the number of mobs pulled at a time.  There is a definate scaling issue.</p></blockquote><p>You are in Raid gear, if SOE makes DM dungeons a challenge for Raid gear players it defeats the entire reason for them.  This is a casual player non-raider feature.  Now at some point SOE might want to look at a flag you can turn on and off for DM's if you chose too, to make them more "Heroic" for raid geared toons that say give 1.5x's the tokens, but making them challenging for a raid geared player right out the gate would be a disaster and create yet another unused game feature since the average player wont be able to beat it reasonably</p></blockquote><p>This is the reason we chose to launch with Avatar's in the first place.  In order to properly scale the challenge of the zone it'll take much more than looking at character level.  We'll need to consider AA's, spell mastery level and gear quality.</p><p>Then once we have a value to measure player power, scaling the NPC's is a different hurdle.  Currently we can only dynamically adjust tier and level.  Modifying stats such as crit, potency, etc is much harder to do on a scaling basis.  Normally those mobs have "buff packages" on them that increase their stats for a given expansion or zone.</p><p>It will take some time but we will continue to work on a solution to make the dungeons scalable and try to maintain an even challenge level across all players.  Until we do that, rewards will need to be disabled for play as your character.</p>

[Cyliena]

<p><cite>Rothgar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>This is the reason we chose to launch with Avatar's in the first place.  In order to properly scale the challenge of the zone it'll take much more than looking at character level.  We'll need to consider AA's, spell mastery level and gear quality.</p><p>Then once we have a value to measure player power, scaling the NPC's is a different hurdle.  Currently we can only dynamically adjust tier and level.  Modifying stats such as crit, potency, etc is much harder to do on a scaling basis.  Normally those mobs have "buff packages" on them that increase their stats for a given expansion or zone.</p><p>It will take some time but we will continue to work on a solution to make the dungeons scalable and try to maintain an even challenge level across all players.  Until we do that, rewards will need to be disabled for play as your character.</p></blockquote><p>So basically you mean that you're going to look at a players gear/stats and all that to assess how difficult to make the dungeons? The first issue I see stemming from that is that some people will macro to weaker gear, load into a dungeon, then macro back to their normal gear. I wouldn't do it but you know someone out there would.</p>

[Banditman]

<p><cite>Rothgar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>It will take some time but we will continue to work on a solution to make the dungeons scalable and try to maintain an even challenge level across all players.  Until we do that, rewards will need to be disabled for play as your character.</p></blockquote><p>I guess my question is:  "Why?"</p><p>I can get better rewards in other places.  It's not like these rewards are going to break the game.  I mean, seriously.  Look at what is available.  Maybe a HM raid geared SK can plow thru these dungeons in a few minutes . . . so what?  Maybe he ends up with 15k tokens in a couple days.  So what?  There isn't anything available there that he can't get more / better of elsewhere with that character.</p><p>The rewards aren't the attraction here.  Clearly, the challenge isn't the attraction.</p><p>If there are better rewards coming, ok, fine, depending on those rewards it might be an issue, but I doubt it.  The dungeons aren't really all that challenging to "real" players, and if they become challenging, the lack of rewards will prevent people from running the dungeons.</p><p>All in all, at the current levels of reward, I just don't see any issue with giving a character the same reward for running the dungeon with an Avatar versus a "real" character.</p>

[Bobonice]

<p>I love the dungeon maker, last night i wnet in to a actually fairly well designed one with a consistent theme and well placed mobs.  it needed a bit more tweaking but it showcased the caability of the system.  The issue i had was that i would move forward egage 2-3 click my attack spell every 5 or 6 sec cast a heal if i dropped below 50% (i was using the icemaiden avatar) I repeated those steps for the next 30 or 40 minutes. </p><p>Yeah okay maybe being raid geared im op for scaling but i honestly think atm i could run with just my thorns and heals (aoe damage proc on all heals cast) and still manage to pull a room of 50 mobs or so and clear it without even spilling my coffee.</p><p>Luckily im a player not a dev so i only have to <censored word for complain> about the implementation not find realistic solutions.  That being said from a 90's standpoint since gear can varry from someone playing sf just hitting lvl 90 with only jouyneman and treasured gear to a hm pow raider (do they even exist yet) maybe do a average gear check though the zone (do a random every ~1min - 2 min gear value or somethign stupid like that) and use that as a end of zone reward multiplier.</p>

[Corydonn]

<p><cite>Rothgar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Persyphony@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Bobonice wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>just ran though rawr(sp?) dungeon with raid geared melee warden.  There wasn't much challenge before in the dungeons i've run and playing as myself took out even the challenge of minimizing the number of mobs pulled at a time.  There is a definate scaling issue.</p></blockquote><p>You are in Raid gear, if SOE makes DM dungeons a challenge for Raid gear players it defeats the entire reason for them.  This is a casual player non-raider feature.  Now at some point SOE might want to look at a flag you can turn on and off for DM's if you chose too, to make them more "Heroic" for raid geared toons that say give 1.5x's the tokens, but making them challenging for a raid geared player right out the gate would be a disaster and create yet another unused game feature since the average player wont be able to beat it reasonably</p></blockquote><p>This is the reason we chose to launch with Avatar's in the first place.  In order to properly scale the challenge of the zone it'll take much more than looking at character level.  We'll need to consider AA's, spell mastery level and gear quality.</p><p>Then once we have a value to measure player power, scaling the NPC's is a different hurdle.  Currently we can only dynamically adjust tier and level.  Modifying stats such as crit, potency, etc is much harder to do on a scaling basis.  Normally those mobs have "buff packages" on them that increase their stats for a given expansion or zone.</p><p>It will take some time but we will continue to work on a solution to make the dungeons scalable and try to maintain an even challenge level across all players.  Until we do that, rewards will need to be disabled for play as your character.</p></blockquote><p>What about just putting hard caps on player stats for these dungeons. Like a player would have to mentor down to 50 with a cap of 40% Crit Bonus and Potency yet are able to retain all of their abilities?</p><p>Edit. Heck even if players are BELOW the stat caps you could even raise them up to 30% to make it even more balanced bringing in lesser geared/leveled friends just like that other game does for War zones.</p>

[Bobonice]

<p>or just as a random thought be able to create an avatar from your characters.</p><p>make it customizable with say 5 spells, equipment and so on.</p><p>Personally being able to customiuze an avatar would be infinitly more interesting to me than playing my regular toon...I run my toon thoguh zones day after day.  I fail to see the excitemnt of going into a theme park ride with it as well</p>

[Teak]

<p><cite>Bobonice wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>or just as a random thought be able to create an avatar from your characters.</p><p>make it customizable with say 5 spells, equipment and so on.</p><p>Personally being able to customiuze an avatar would be infinitly more interesting to me than playing my regular toon...I run my toon thoguh zones day after day.  I fail to see the excitemnt of going into a theme park ride with it as well</p></blockquote><p>This is what I would like to see. I think balancing vs current structure of toons is a monumental task. So big that I don't think it will ever work 100% and will constantly need to be tweaked. I'd rather have a limited version of my toon(s) that I can customize somewhat with appearance gear and a small choice of spells/CA to determine to some degree how I play that class (melee healer vs pure healer vs nuke healer, etc). Have these limited toons stay with you (don't want to remake them every DM instance). Give me a sense of accomplishment with my game-within-a-game toon. That would be cool. Of course I'd want to give them a name just like my normal toons.</p><p>It might be a big effort to organize and program for this structure in the beginning, but likely not as much in the end as the effort it will be to constantly tweak DM for the current complexity of our actual toons.</p>

[apwyork]

<p>Before doing all this work to get the created dungeons to scale for player toons themselves, wouldn't it seem to be a bit more practical to work on the scaling issues on the existing avatar versions first?  I've been testing dungeons created for different numbers of people in the group and it appears that the scaling is totally messed.  If you take a solo strength dungeon and run 2 people in it, they breeze through it in a fraction of the time.  If you take a created dungeon meant for two players and try with 3 it scales up in difficulty/time spent as expected but adding a 4th person turns it into a hellishly long time eating nightmare where the rewards are only a fraction of what could be obtained even from doing smaller solo versions.</p><p>Once you throw in the additional complication of trying to create a scaling system to take into affect all the nuances of player characters in all their forms, it would seem that the scaling issues are going to suffer even more.  A raid geared 90 totally outclasses a non-raid 90, who absolutely dominates any other level when scaled to them.  Anyone who's chrono'd knows the scaling issues for characters are off, as evidenced by solo chrono'd 90s killing epics.</p><p>In my opinion and in my experience of both the creation, and running of the avatar dungeons, I think it would be better for the community overall to improve that aspect instead of adding in even more issues from allowing characters to run them.</p>

[Aethn]

<p><cite>Cyliena wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>So basically you mean that you're going to look at a players gear/stats and all that to assess how difficult to make the dungeons? The first issue I see stemming from that is that some people will macro to weaker gear, load into a dungeon, then macro back to their normal gear. I wouldn't do it but you know someone out there would.</p></blockquote><p>They could write a tool that could check for this, and flags accounts if there is a constant major shift in gear directly after loading the DM's, then after x times this gets kickes out to a CSR to be verified and appropriate action s can be taken against those accounts exploiting this.</p>

[gourdon]

<p><cite>Rothgar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Persyphony@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Bobonice wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>just ran though rawr(sp?) dungeon with raid geared melee warden.  There wasn't much challenge before in the dungeons i've run and playing as myself took out even the challenge of minimizing the number of mobs pulled at a time.  There is a definate scaling issue.</p></blockquote><p>You are in Raid gear, if SOE makes DM dungeons a challenge for Raid gear players it defeats the entire reason for them.  This is a casual player non-raider feature.  Now at some point SOE might want to look at a flag you can turn on and off for DM's if you chose too, to make them more "Heroic" for raid geared toons that say give 1.5x's the tokens, but making them challenging for a raid geared player right out the gate would be a disaster and create yet another unused game feature since the average player wont be able to beat it reasonably</p></blockquote><p>This is the reason we chose to launch with Avatar's in the first place.  In order to properly scale the challenge of the zone it'll take much more than looking at character level.  We'll need to consider AA's, spell mastery level and gear quality.</p><p>Then once we have a value to measure player power, scaling the NPC's is a different hurdle.  Currently we can only dynamically adjust tier and level.  Modifying stats such as crit, potency, etc is much harder to do on a scaling basis.  Normally those mobs have "buff packages" on them that increase their stats for a given expansion or zone.</p><p>It will take some time but we will continue to work on a solution to make the dungeons scalable and try to maintain an even challenge level across all players.  Until we do that, rewards will need to be disabled for play as your character.</p></blockquote><p>Adjusting to the character stats is insane.  Just adjust to the difficulty of normal content.  Then, let the player select their difficulty level with 1 being standard solo/group and scale up linearly from there to a pretty high level that will be very hard to defeat.  For rewards give a much smaller amount for playing your own character than the avatars and give a less than linear increase in reward for higher difficulty (diminishing returns).  Let the players balance the dungeons themselves.  It might be necessary to limit how often a particular dungeon can be played to 1/day (while playing your own character only?) to reduce the exploitability of the system.  It might also be a good idea to limit how many dungeons a person can do per day on a particular character as well.</p>

[Deago]

<p>Developing an algorithm to automatically scale based on a  toons....shall we say uberness..</p><p>As a software engineer I would have to say this sounds like super fun!  Rothgar has a fun (potentially stressful) task hehe.</p><p>Good luck!</p><p>Lol not that it would fly well but would be lol if you all of the sudden had a stat at the bottom like:</p><p>Uberness:  3.2  (based on 5.0 scale)  lol</p>

[Valdaglerion]

<p><cite>Cyliena wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Rothgar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>This is the reason we chose to launch with Avatar's in the first place.  In order to properly scale the challenge of the zone it'll take much more than looking at character level.  We'll need to consider AA's, spell mastery level and gear quality.</p><p>Then once we have a value to measure player power, scaling the NPC's is a different hurdle.  Currently we can only dynamically adjust tier and level.  Modifying stats such as crit, potency, etc is much harder to do on a scaling basis.  Normally those mobs have "buff packages" on them that increase their stats for a given expansion or zone.</p><p>It will take some time but we will continue to work on a solution to make the dungeons scalable and try to maintain an even challenge level across all players.  Until we do that, rewards will need to be disabled for play as your character.</p></blockquote><p>So basically you mean that you're going to look at a players gear/stats and all that to assess how difficult to make the dungeons? The first issue I see stemming from that is that some people will macro to weaker gear, load into a dungeon, then macro back to their normal gear. I wouldn't do it but you know someone out there would.</p></blockquote><p>They already seem to be doing a check against the strength of the group as remaining mobs in the dungeon scale difficulty based on the number of people in the group running it. Stands to reason if they are doing this type of check already they could apply it to assigning a value based on gear, spells etc and if that value changes then reassign difficult of remaining mobs based on the new stat value.</p><p>Working out this type of mechanic goes a long way in helping them balance all game content to keep overpowered toons from trivializing content which has been a large factor in economic problems within the game.</p>

[Bhagpuss]

<p>Just ran through the Dungeon "A Little Bit of This... A Lot  of That" playing as a 90th Bruiser. My gear is mostly quested or open world/easy dungeon dropped Legendary, pre-Velious, pre-item revamp (so poor by today's standards). My bruiser has under 200 AAs (foolishly logged him out before I began this post so I can't remember exactly how many - probably around 170).</p><p>The dungeon was very pleasant in terms of difficulty. Absolutely no risk involved but the fights took a fair while, which is just how I like it. Unlike the Avatars, who run out of power very quickly if I pull a lot of mobs at once, my Bruiser could pull most of a room and chip away at everything at once, which is my preferred gameplay.</p><p>I like the normal Avatar Dungeon Maker gameplay so I'm not one of the folks that feels the "your character" option was particularly needed. If the price of playing as your own character is not to get any reward at all (marks, xp) then I really can't see any point in it. On the other hand, it's clearly much, much easier to play as your own character and will be a nightmare to balance so I entirely understand why giving rewards is going to be problematic.</p><p>The problem as i see it is this: if playing as your character is <span style="text-decoration: underline;"><em>in any way</em></span> perceived as being less optimal than playing as an avatar there will be uproar. Being given the option to play as your own character will not be received as a nice option and good response to player feedback unless it is at least as good in terms of all rewards as playing as an avatar. Anything less will be received as "a slap in the face" and "forcing us to play as avatars".</p><p>It would be better to hold the line and offer avatars only than to go Live with a "play as your character" option that could be perceived as inferior to playing as an avatar. It would be nice to imagine that players would be grateful for the choice and understanding of the difficulties but they just won't be.</p><p>Leaving that aside, one of the nicest things about the Avatar system is that absolutely anyone can group with absolutely anyone using it. I've been duoing the dungeons on Freeport as a 90th Berserker with Velious gear and 250 AAs playing with a level 20 crafter who's never adventured at all and it works perfectly. The characters are perfectly balanced and equally useful. You can't do that with mentoring.</p><p>How will "play as your character" work with characters of different levels? Will it allow mentoring? Chronomentoring? What new kinds of balance problems will <em>that</em> bring to the table? And if you do manage to get some kind of *cough* Gearscore *cough* system running, how will that deal with duos or groups of characters with wildly different gear/AAs? Let alone levels.</p>

[Nakaru-Nitepaw]

<p>Yea avatars die too fast. If you get more then 4 mobs on you, it's safe to say you'll die and have to run back. I was in a dungeon on AB once, it was crammed so full of mobss it made me feel like a lemming. I was frustrated by the end. I hope to never replay it with an avatar. Playing through with an avatar equals "go into room, pull anything, everything comes, only manage to take down 1 mob, die, come back" wash rince repeat until the room is clear. That shouldn't be how you play this game. Death is treated as just another obstacle "Oops I died. Better keep moving". Sure some of the the blame could go to the dungeon designer for being over zealious with the mob spawners, but a huge portion of the problem is the lack of health, power, defence, and combat prowls of the avatars. They don't have what it takes to survive in tough situations, but if I run my real characters I'd probably have a blood bath field day. To be fair I don't think even a player character should be able to face a room so thick of mobs you can't see the floor. To me that'd be like when Han Solo ran into that cargo bay on the death star and saw it packed full of stormtroopers, he just about pooped himself and ran back in a panic to warn the others and get outta there. lol</p>

[Gaealiege]

<p>My berserker pulls 2-3 rooms simultaneously clears them within a minute move on.</p><p>I hope the rewards for this are dramatically lowered.  The same dungeon that would have taken me 25 minutes now takes me around 3.</p>

[Elspith]

<p>I think it would be best to just let us use our characters BUT:</p><p>1.  We can only choose 4-5 skills from our bar to use (selected right when we enter)</p><p>2. No Mentoring</p><p>3. Mobs scale as in the SS instances, for example: Sabaron but depends on how many in group.</p>

[Nakaru-Nitepaw]

<p><cite>Gaealiege@Butcherblock wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I hope the rewards for this are dramatically lowered.</p></blockquote><p>I don't really think that will help. All a person would have to do is speed run the same dungeon a few times to make up the same reward as 1 run as an avatar. It wont stop people from getting the tokens, because grinding is what people do in a MMO. It wont even take longer because they can be cleared so fast. I think srengthening the difficulty of the mobs and the avatars to get them on par with something a average player character would face, would be more productive. The only reason a player character can stomp those dungeons so quickly is because they were designed to be fought with a avatar. If the challange of the avatars and mobs are cranked up to average player difficulty it should balance things out. Of course don't crank them up to fabled/mastered level or anything like that, because that would be suicide for an average player.</p>

[redwoodtreesprite]

<p>Main thing is, this should be casual friendly.  Don't make it really hard to please the uber geared ones.  There are many who will be doing it who are low level or are silver so cannot bring their AAs up as easily.</p><p>Why not just make setting choices and make all the barter items heirloom?  And not worry so much about some players grinding them for marks.  The higher the setting the higher amount of marks one would get.</p>

[Gaealiege]

<p>Even if you make these mobs the average overland mob difficulty I will still pull entire rooms and clear it in minutes.  You'd have to raise the difficulty to an absurd level and then it would be just stupid.  It's a token grind. </p><p>My point wasn't that players wouldn't grind it.  My point is that they are making the avatars obsolete in one fell swipe, as is typical of the over the top changes that SOE always makes.  So to give anyone the option of a 25 minute run for 120 tokens or a 2 minute run for tokens is just stupid.   No single player will take the 25 minute option.</p><p>It's stupid design on SOE's part if the rewards are identical.  I suppose I shouldn't complain though.  With my actual character, I'll get 30-40,000 tokens in a few days and disco everything new thta comes out from that point on.</p>

[ShadowMunkie]

<p><cite>Gaealiege@Butcherblock wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Even if you make these mobs the average overland mob difficulty I will still pull entire rooms and clear it in minutes.  You'd have to raise the difficulty to an absurd level and then it would be just stupid.  It's a token grind. </p><p>My point wasn't that players wouldn't grind it.  My point is that they are making the avatars obsolete in one fell swipe, as is typical of the over the top changes that SOE always makes.  So to give anyone the option of a 25 minute run for 120 tokens or a 2 minute run for tokens is just stupid.   No single player will take the 25 minute option.</p><p>It's stupid design on SOE's part if the rewards are identical.  I suppose I shouldn't complain though.  With my actual character, I'll get 30-40,000 tokens in a few days and disco everything new thta comes out from that point on.</p></blockquote><p>QFE</p><p>I've created a zone that one could clear and obtain possibly over 1500 tokens in one fell swoop and it wouldn't take longer than 20 minutes with an SK. It's a bunch of even con mobs, 100-200 per room and with a Raid Geared SK it won't take anything to clear it.</p>

[Nakaru-Nitepaw]

<p><cite>Senkai@Splitpaw wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I've created a zone that one could clear and obtain possibly over 1500 tokens in one fell swoop and it wouldn't take longer than 20 minutes with an SK. It's a bunch of even con mobs, 100-200 per room and with a Raid Geared SK it won't take anything to clear it.</p></blockquote><p>If it's on Test_Copy I may have played it with my raid geared melee warden. Fun! <img src="/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Armawk]

<p>Perhaps some kind of calculation on zone-in which raises mob level by 1 for a given amount of crit mit above a  base level? Let someone in Raid gear fight orange mobs, would that help? Cannot be beyond the art of a dev to come up with a scheme that will mitigate the craziness of top end gear in these things surely?</p><p>Also dont allow gear changing in the dungeons at all. Thats mechanically done elsewhere after all.</p>

[ShadowMunkie]

<p><cite>Armawk@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Perhaps some kind of calculation on zone-in which raises mob level by 1 for a given amount of crit mit above a  base level? Let someone in Raid gear fight orange mobs, would that help? Cannot be beyond the art of a dev to come up with a scheme that will mitigate the craziness of top end gear in these things surely?</p><p>Also dont allow gear changing in the dungeons at all. Thats mechanically done elsewhere after all.</p></blockquote><p>No it won't help.</p><p>As long as the person going into the dungeon is solo/duo they will still be able to kill hundreds of orange con mobs.</p><p>@Nakaru: No that wasn't my dungeon I haven't published it yet on any server.</p>

[Kizee]

<p><cite>Elspith wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I think it would be best to just let us use our characters BUT:</p><p><span style="color: #ffff00;">1.  We can only choose 4-5 skills from our bar to use (selected right when we enter)</span></p><p>2. No Mentoring</p><p>3. Mobs scale as in the SS instances, for example: Sabaron but depends on how many in group.</p></blockquote><p>What is the point if you gotta pick a couple CA's?  It would be the same thing as running a avatar though... haha</p>

[Nakaru-Nitepaw]

<p><cite>Hissyfit@Oasis wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Elspith wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I think it would be best to just let us use our characters BUT:</p><p><span style="color: #ffff00;">1.  We can only choose 4-5 skills from our bar to use (selected right when we enter)</span></p><p>2. No Mentoring</p><p>3. Mobs scale as in the SS instances, for example: Sabaron but depends on how many in group.</p></blockquote><p>What is the point if you gotta pick a couple CA's?  It would be the same thing as running a avatar though... haha</p></blockquote><p>The EQ2 Devs don't strike me as the type that would go to such lengths just to stablize something like this. I say that because I've yet to see them do it. They're more likely to either beef up the difficulty of avatars/mobs, lower the rewards for player toons, or scrap the whole plan of allowing player toons all together. Besides the background coding to disable everything but a few abilities may ("may" as in I'm guessing) not be as easy as some think. Why I believe that is because it hasn't been done to the mentoring system to disable abilities you aren't at the appropriate mentored level for. I'm sure if it was possible it would have been done.</p>

[Whilhelmina]

<p>I don't like the idea of "playing as yourself" if the dungeon doesn't take into account your stats. If I zone into a DM with my level 76 test, quest-stuffed brigand, I'll have to fight and think about what I'm doing and such. If my raid geared hubby enters a dungeon, he will just kill the whole dungeon in a blink which kinda defeats the whole prupose of DM in my point of view.</p><p>A good solution imo would be the one given earlier in the thread: cap the stats. If a level 90 player enters, he cannot have more than (random numbers): 80 crit mit, 80 crit bonus and such. So your dungeon will not be totally trivialized for raid-geared players.</p>

[screenid]

<p>I used my lv 90 Warden - 254 aa - Mostly Mastered - PQ gear - Myth Buff</p><p><strong>- Love playing as my Toon...this is going to be Huge to the palyer Base.-  BTW</strong></p><p>I Built a dungeon called "Wave after Wave"  and also ran through a  dungeon named "tested"</p><p>I only had one point in "Wave" after "Wave" where my health fell at an alarming rate...enough to cause a challenge.  --This was when almost an entire room of Mobs attacked...    </p><p>I am not sure how you are going to get around the Balance issue ... unless you allow us Players to Tier our Dungeons  ( and give our players a heads up to the challenge level we as DMs had in mind)</p><p>Allow us  to set our Dungeon as  "Easy" - "Normal" - "Hard"    (as a default value) then build from there.</p><p> I want to make the Dungeon a challenge w/o having to load it with a bazillion mobs</p><p><strong><span style="color: #ffff00;">SOLO/ DUO  -Default </span></strong></p><p>Easy Dungeon would set all NPCs at a default  "Even con"    =least amount of Tokens </p><p>Normal Dungeon would set all NPCs at a default  " ^ even con"  =Normal amount of Tokens</p><p>Hard Dungeon would set all NPCs at a default  "^^ 1 to 2 lvls higher than players"  = High amount of Tokens</p><p><strong><span style="color: #ffff00;">Group (3 or more)   -Default </span></strong></p><p>Easy Dungeon would set all NPCs at a default  "^^^ 1 to 2 lvls lower than players"    =least amount of Tokens</p><p>Normal Dungeon would set all NPCs at a default  " ^^^ even con"  =Normal amount of Tokens</p><p>Hard Dungeon would set all NPCs at a default  "^^^ 1 to 4  lvls higher than players"  = High amount of Tokens</p>

[Armawk]

<p>Im not even sure the balance issue IS an issue as such. Raiders can currently walk in a level 90 solo questing area or easy dungeon  in their gear and pull most of the zone and kill it in seconds and take the loot for all the good it will do them. How is this different to that? Why would they want to? Why does it have to provide a challenge for someone in high level raid gear?</p>

[ratbast]

<p><cite>Armawk@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Im not even sure the balance issue IS an issue as such. Raiders can currently walk in a level 90 solo questing area or easy dungeon  in their gear and pull most of the zone and kill it in seconds and take the loot for all the good it will do them. How is this different to that? Why would they want to? Why does it have to provide a challenge for someone in high level raid gear?</p></blockquote><p>disparity of toons power/ability is a requirement of mmorpg. balancing this fluff feature (DF) to scale for raiders is a waste of energy. just let them pillage and keep rewards heirloom.</p>

[Armawk]

<p>That was my point, indeed.</p>

[Felshades]

<p><cite>Armawk@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Perhaps some kind of calculation on zone-in which raises mob level by 1 for a given amount of crit mit above a  base level? Let someone in Raid gear fight orange mobs, would that help? Cannot be beyond the art of a dev to come up with a scheme that will mitigate the craziness of top end gear in these things surely?</p><p>Also dont allow gear changing in the dungeons at all. Thats mechanically done elsewhere after all.</p></blockquote><p>My raid geared berserker would make mincemeat out of orange or even red conned non heroic mobs.</p>

[Neiloch]

<p><cite>ratbastard wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Armawk@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Im not even sure the balance issue IS an issue as such. Raiders can currently walk in a level 90 solo questing area or easy dungeon  in their gear and pull most of the zone and kill it in seconds and take the loot for all the good it will do them. How is this different to that? Why would they want to? Why does it have to provide a challenge for someone in high level raid gear?</p></blockquote><p>disparity of toons power/ability is a requirement of mmorpg. balancing this fluff feature (DF) to scale for raiders is a waste of energy. just let them pillage and keep rewards heirloom.</p></blockquote><p>Without massive amounts of work I think this is really their only option. If I spent countless hours making my character powerful why shouldn't it be able to perform better than these avatars? If they didn't I would be just as bored with this whole feature even if using my player character. I do think the content should be made harder compared to whats on test, but some sort of intricate balance mechanics is just a waste of time.</p><p>Only bad thing I can really see resulting from people being able to get as many tokens as they want is that they will get burned out much quicker. This will just leave players who actually want to enjoy a player created dungeon for its design. Maybe make it so if they run with a player character they can't 'rate' the dungeons.</p>

[Felshades]

<p><cite>Neiloch@Butcherblock wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>ratbastard wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Armawk@Everfrost wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Im not even sure the balance issue IS an issue as such. Raiders can currently walk in a level 90 solo questing area or easy dungeon  in their gear and pull most of the zone and kill it in seconds and take the loot for all the good it will do them. How is this different to that? Why would they want to? Why does it have to provide a challenge for someone in high level raid gear?</p></blockquote><p>disparity of toons power/ability is a requirement of mmorpg. balancing this fluff feature (DF) to scale for raiders is a waste of energy. just let them pillage and keep rewards heirloom.</p></blockquote><p>Without massive amounts of work I think this is really their only option. If I spent countless hours making my character powerful why shouldn't it be able to perform better than these avatars? If they didn't I would be just as bored with this whole feature even if using my player character. I do think the content should be made harder compared to whats on test, but some sort of intricate balance mechanics is just a waste of time.</p><p>Only bad thing I can really see resulting from people being able to get as many tokens as they want is that they will get burned out much quicker. This will just leave players who actually want to enjoy a player created dungeon for its design. Maybe make it so if they run with a player character they can't 'rate' the dungeons.</p></blockquote><p>Gonna go ahead and say that I didn't spend a lot of time making mine powerful. I just picked up alt loot while raiding on my dirge. No work involved.</p>

[Sarriss]

<p><cite>Rothgar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Persyphony@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Bobonice wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>just ran though rawr(sp?) dungeon with raid geared melee warden.  There wasn't much challenge before in the dungeons i've run and playing as myself took out even the challenge of minimizing the number of mobs pulled at a time.  There is a definate scaling issue.</p></blockquote><p>You are in Raid gear, if SOE makes DM dungeons a challenge for Raid gear players it defeats the entire reason for them.  This is a casual player non-raider feature.  Now at some point SOE might want to look at a flag you can turn on and off for DM's if you chose too, to make them more "Heroic" for raid geared toons that say give 1.5x's the tokens, but making them challenging for a raid geared player right out the gate would be a disaster and create yet another unused game feature since the average player wont be able to beat it reasonably</p></blockquote><p>This is the reason we chose to launch with Avatar's in the first place.  In order to properly scale the challenge of the zone it'll take much more than looking at character level.  We'll need to consider AA's, spell mastery level and gear quality.</p><p>Then once we have a value to measure player power, scaling the NPC's is a different hurdle.  Currently we can only dynamically adjust tier and level.  Modifying stats such as crit, potency, etc is much harder to do on a scaling basis.  Normally those mobs have "buff packages" on them that increase their stats for a given expansion or zone.</p><p>It will take some time but we will continue to work on a solution to make the dungeons scalable and try to maintain an even challenge level across all players.  Until we do that, rewards will need to be disabled for play as your character.</p></blockquote><p>You making this harder than it needs to be really. You already have a way to measure player power; the stats.</p> <p>Example:</p> <p>(Stamania + Primary stat) * .5</p> <p>(Mitigation + all resists) * .10</p> <p>(Low quality blue stats like DPS and spells weapon stats) * .5</p> <p>(high quality stats like multi attack, AE auto attack and casting/reuse speed) * 1</p> <p>(crazy stats like spell double attack and flurry) * 1.5</p> <p>This is not a complete list, but you get the idea.</p> <p>After you get a total number, you can create percentage based buff packages based on it. I wouldn't mess with level, leave that to the designer.</p><p>The bonud for using an avatar, Player characters earn considerably less XP (maybe 1/4 as much as avatars)</p> <p>Designers also need a way to create encounters which also leads to a way to deal with group:</p> <p>When placing mobs next to each other, they for an encounter with the most difficult (i.e. the rarer) of them being the primary mob, this mob is slightly more difficult than the rest (he’d be the ^^^ in the middle of the no arrow mobs) in the case of bosses and elites all other mobs in the encounter level up to match the highest level. if there are more than 6 mobs in close vicinity, then they become a swarm, excluding bosses and elites</p> <p>the more people that log in the stronger the encounters get via up and down arrows:</p> <p>1-2 people: solos are no arrow with elites at ^, Bosses would be ^ or ^^ and encounters would have a no arrow primary and down arrows based on how many there are. All swarms are vvv</p> <p>3 people: solos would be ^, elites would be ^^, bosses would be ^^ or ^^^ and encounters would have a no arrow primary but there would be fewer if any down arrows amongst the adds. Swarms 7-10 are vv with 11+ vvv</p> <p>4-5 people: solos would be ^^, elites would be ^^^, bosses would be ^^^ and encounters would have a ^ primary with the adds having ^ or no arrows depending on number. Swarms 7-10 are v with 11+ vv</p> <p>6 people: Everything is ^^^ except encounter adds where there are 3 or more total mobs to the encounter. Swarms 7-10 are no arrows with 11+ as v</p> <p>I hope this makes sense.</p>

[Neiloch]

<p><cite>Felshades wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Gonna go ahead and say that I didn't spend a lot of time making mine powerful. I just picked up alt loot while raiding on my dirge. No work involved.</p></blockquote><p>Except for the part where you raided on your dirge. really only way you could have not 'worked' on a highly geared character is by buying lots of plat and then buying loot rights with said plat.</p><p>Also I would like to add that I wouldn't have a problem with player character runs getting less experience, if any at all. There is more than enough content already to get experience on a regular character. The problem I have is gating/restricting DM specific loot and rewards from PC's when there is no other way to acquire them without playing an avatar. And, which has been stated several times, avatar play is simply much less than than PC play.</p>

[Hamervelder]

<p><cite>redwoodtreesprite wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Main thing is, this should be casual friendly.  Don't make it really hard to please the uber geared ones.  There are many who will be doing it who are low level or are silver so cannot bring their AAs up as easily.</p><p>Why not just make setting choices and make all the barter items heirloom?  And not worry so much about some players grinding them for marks.  The higher the setting the higher amount of marks one would get.</p></blockquote><p>This is the most sensible idea that I've heard.  Simply give players the ability to choose the difficulty of the dungeon, and adjust the rewards accordingly.</p>

[Pixiewrath]

<p><cite>Elhonas@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>redwoodtreesprite wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Main thing is, this should be casual friendly.  Don't make it really hard to please the uber geared ones.  There are many who will be doing it who are low level or are silver so cannot bring their AAs up as easily.</p><p>Why not just make setting choices and make all the barter items heirloom?  And not worry so much about some players grinding them for marks.  The higher the setting the higher amount of marks one would get.</p></blockquote><p>This is the most sensible idea that I've heard.  Simply give players the ability to choose the difficulty of the dungeon, and adjust the rewards accordingly.</p></blockquote><p>+1 for this. Choosing between easy, medium, and hard would be really really great!</p>

[gourdon]

<p><cite>Pixiewrath@The Bazaar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Elhonas@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>redwoodtreesprite wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Main thing is, this should be casual friendly.  Don't make it really hard to please the uber geared ones.  There are many who will be doing it who are low level or are silver so cannot bring their AAs up as easily.</p><p>Why not just make setting choices and make all the barter items heirloom?  And not worry so much about some players grinding them for marks.  The higher the setting the higher amount of marks one would get.</p></blockquote><p>This is the most sensible idea that I've heard.  Simply give players the ability to choose the difficulty of the dungeon, and adjust the rewards accordingly.</p></blockquote><p>+1 for this. Choosing between easy, medium, and hard would be really really great!</p></blockquote><p>There needs to be relatively small jumps between difficulty, or we will have the same problems that the regular game content does where there are huge leaps in difficulty between the really easy and really hard.</p>

[Pixiewrath]

<p>Of course. I don't think this would work well with avatars though, since those were kind of tailored for the dungeon maker.But making it too easy or too hard isn't good either. But at least it would give options.Taking on epic mobs in dungeon maker can be hard as it is already. Or time-consuming. Dang, those lvl 55 epics in full groups surely pack a punch!But would be nice to get more control of difficulty. More options are always welcome.</p>

[Nrgy]

<p>All SOE needs to do to curb the farming 24/7 is make Player-Toon reward 1/10 of the token reward and Avatar-Toon reward a full share.  So all the raid geared AOE Zerkers would need to run ten dungeons for the same reward as 1 Avatar.  You (SOE) cannot balance the player toons .. but you can balance the reward and control the time it takes to get those rewards.  Would Raid geared Zerkers rather run 10 dungeons with their own toon or a single dungeon with their Avatar ... I'm betting they would still run the raid geared Zerker 9 out of 10 times. </p><p>No more balancing needed. </p>

[screenid]

<p><img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" />  Warden in Action  ==  this is from Wave after Wave DM </p><p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nXB25s1bU0">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nXB25s1bU0</a></p>

[Roslyn]

<p>I am working hard on a dungeon on live but waiting until people can run their real characters through it (and until I get some appropriate bosses, lol). I am actually really comfortable with the idea of taking in about 8 abilities as my own character, probably because I've been playing a lot of GW lately. Mentoring would seem like an easy fix except mentoring is utterly broken right now as far as over-poweredness. Whatever it takes, I'm very excited to run these zones as my own character, or a facsimile of her, because it's much more immersive than being a droag.</p><p>As far as preventing people from just demolishing the dungeons, when I build a dungeon I am not doing it for the grinders. To me, the "300 mark runs!" zones with the max amount of mobs in one room are just SO boring! I'm much more impressed by a nice flowing dungeon with a fun story involved, and if some SK comes in and rips all the mobs to shreds, they won't be coming back anyway because they probably couldn't care less aobut my theme. I guess what I mean is there's no restriction from people playing like that outside the dungeons, if you want to level up by grinding Sebilis for hours on end that's fine, I personally don't like grinding. If you want to grind tokens in boring dungeons for hours on end, I don't really care to try to stop you there either.</p>

[Neiloch]

<p><cite>Nrgy wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>All SOE needs to do to curb the farming 24/7 is make Player-Toon reward 1/10 of the token reward and Avatar-Toon reward a full share.  So all the raid geared AOE Zerkers would need to run ten dungeons for the same reward as 1 Avatar.  You (SOE) cannot balance the player toons .. but you can balance the reward and control the time it takes to get those rewards.  Would Raid geared Zerkers rather run 10 dungeons with their own toon or a single dungeon with their Avatar ... I'm betting they would still run the raid geared Zerker 9 out of 10 times. </p><p>No more balancing needed. </p></blockquote><p>Why are people so dead set on making DM just outright not fun for player characters?</p><p>If people don't want to play DM on avatars, THEY ARE NOT GOING TO PLAY ON AVATARS. Many people including myself don't want to play the DM simply because we can't use our PC's. Making it so we can but get next to nothing while playing PC's isn't going to change anything. Sorry to say but the player created dungeons just aren't so awesome where people would love to play them with little to no reward.</p><p>Stop entertaining this idea that PC's will be playable so a bunch of people will play the DM that didn't before, see PC's get much less than avatars then convert to using avatars. Not going to happen. They will see avatars get more rewards then go back to not playing it some more.</p><p>So people will want to farm DM. Why not? What's the problem? They farm EVERYTHING else. why would DM get to be exempt from this playstyle? DM getting farmed would be the least damaging form of farming in the entire game given the nature of the rewards available. Any suggestion to dissuade people from playing their player characters so they play the avatars is ignorant. 'Let's do work to add a feature of people playing their PC's then make it not fun.' Awesome idea.</p><p>If the work/reward ratio of playing a PC is the same as an avatar the DM won't see a sustained increase in use. It will will see a spike at first then go back to being a touted feature many people just outright don't use. Lacking in general use compared to all the other features of the game.</p><p><cite>Roslyn wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I guess what I mean is there's no restriction from people playing like that outside the dungeons, if you want to level up by grinding Sebilis for hours on end that's fine, I personally don't like grinding. If you want to grind tokens in boring dungeons for hours on end, I don't really care to try to stop you there either.</p></blockquote><p>THIS is the proper attitude.</p>

[Nakaru-Nitepaw]

<p>I wholeheartedly agree with Neilock. The rewards aren't all that great either way you play through the dungeons. It's just a fun deversion. Sure there are fabled shoulder pads, but I'm sure a lot of folks who go in there with fabled shoulder pads already have better ones. If not, then they get a tiny upgrade. It wont make that big of a difference in a regular dungeon against regular mobs. It just goes back to that age old complaint that so-and-such is reaching the goal faster then everyone else, but look at the end results for a sec. Does it really effect everyone else?</p>

[Davngr1]

<p>this might have been said before and if it was sorry for saying it again.</p> <p>  i like playing my character that i gear and spec'd for my enjoyment not some avatar with 4 ca's or whtever..</p> <p>    i understand the problem with full hardmode players oneshoting anything that the average geared player would slave thru but there are ways to adjust difficulty/hp dependent on the stats of the group/player.   </p><p>  it can't be that difficult to develop some sort of inspecting system that will tune the instance dependent on what the players stats are.   of course make equipping gear impossible in the zone so people can't exploit and i'm sure some will still not be happy but over all at least we will be playing our own characters.</p>

[Pixiewrath]

<p><cite>Arduous@The Bazaar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><img src="/eq2/images/smilies/283a16da79f3aa23fe1025c96295f04f.gif" border="0" />  Warden in Action  ==  this is from Wave after Wave DM </p><p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nXB25s1bU0">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nXB25s1bU0</a></p></blockquote><p>I think: Warlock.I also think: Character play = Mega mob buffs</p>

[gatrm]

<p>I could be completely wrong here, but can't the player designers of the dungeons modify the difficulty?  I have certainly been in a few that were much easier than others.  I have even been in one where there was a ^^ mob, so why wouldn't it be possible to simply create dungeons with ^^/^^^ stuff in them?  I'm sure if the rewards were better, then well geared players would do those for the better rewards than the solo stuff that might be tough for the avatars.</p><p>If you merely adjust the difficulty upwards from what currently exists on live, so that it's a better challenge for player characters, you make the zones unplayable for avatars.  Instead add more options for dungeon creators to put in more challenging content, and you'll wind up with both- zones appropriate for avatars and zones appropriate for player characters.</p>

[Raknid]

<p><cite>gatrm wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I could be completely wrong here, but can't the player designers of the dungeons modify the difficulty? </p></blockquote><p>LOL. Why yes, yes the can, but a utility that should be free costs money.</p>

[Neiloch]

<p><cite>Raknid wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>gatrm wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I could be completely wrong here, but can't the player designers of the dungeons modify the difficulty? </p></blockquote><p>LOL. Why yes, yes the can, but a utility that should be free costs money.</p></blockquote><p>Well you could buy them with the DM tokens. Players themselves seem dead set on making sure people can't have a lot of tokens preventing them from make more interesting, fun dungeons.</p>

[Raknid]

<p><cite>Neiloch@Butcherblock wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Raknid wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>gatrm wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I could be completely wrong here, but can't the player designers of the dungeons modify the difficulty? </p></blockquote><p>LOL. Why yes, yes the can, but a utility that should be free costs money.</p></blockquote><p>Well you could buy them with the DM tokens. Players themselves seem dead set on making sure people can't have a lot of tokens preventing them from make more interesting, fun dungeons.</p></blockquote><p>True. But the sheer volume of things needed to be purchased with DM tokens, and their DM token price, all but insures that there will be many that HAVE to be purchased with RL cash.</p><p>Now if they would roll all the modifiers into one package for a reasonable cost...</p><p>Instead you get:</p><p>Make one mob one level higher</p><p>Make multi mobs one level higher</p><p>Make one mob one level lower</p><p>Make multi mobs one level lower</p><p>Make one mob two levels higher</p><p>Make multi mobs two levels higher</p><p>Make one mob two levels lower</p><p>Etc...</p><p>All for the price of a couple hours of your time EACH by running the player made dungeons. </p>

[Pixiewrath]

<p>I also think it's weird to have to play to get tools. Imagine building a level in Half-Life 2 and having to deathmatch to unlock all items and textures. Weird.But on the other hand it does increase replay value having something to strive for. (NOT including the increase to 900 tokens on decoration objects, I despise that). But 300 tokens for an effect object isn't too hard to get. Only have a few levels/tiers, then I am done with that section until they add some more.And you hardly use all of the down tiers/levels anyway. Only in some rooms.What is annoying me however is that you only can place 5 of each. Should be at least 15-20 because it's impossible to tailor encounters well as it is now.</p>

[Raknid]

<p><cite>Pixiewrath@The Bazaar wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>I also think it's weird to have to play to get tools. Imagine building a level in Half-Life 2 and having to deathmatch to unlock all items and textures. Weird.But on the other hand it does increase replay value having something to strive for. (NOT including the increase to 900 tokens on decoration objects, I despise that). But 300 tokens for an effect object isn't too hard to get. Only have a few levels/tiers, then I am done with that section until they add some more.And you hardly use all of the down tiers/levels anyway. Only in some rooms.What is annoying me however is that you only can place 5 of each. Should be at least 15-20 because it's impossible to tailor encounters well as it is now.</p></blockquote><p>Out of curiousity, how long does it take you to get the 300 tokens needed for a single effect? Sure, they aren't "hard" to get, but they are tedious and take a fair amount of time.</p>