Spiral Knights - The issue with difficulty

The issue with difficulty

4 replies [Last post]

Wed, 04/03/2013 - 17:42

Thimol

It looks as if Three Rings wants the CoD audience and thus beat the "game" part of the game into a chunky paté, and this really puts them and the "game" at odds with the people who want the actual game back.

Now I know that there has been suggested before the option for difficulty levels, but that poses the problem of payment. Any yahoo could just set the difficulty to "skipping in the wildflower fields" and grind their way to the next tax bracket, so perhaps with difficulty, the loot rewarded could be scaled as well.

That, though, poses the problem of "fairness". The noisy mewlings could, in fact, make a good point that they're being shafted just for being new to the game. We could just encourage them to challenge themselves, but in a world that is increasingly becoming inclined toward instant gratification, that doesn't seem such a plausible option as of late.

So how do we go about this?

Wed, 04/03/2013 - 18:41

Super-Ratman

We have tiers.

Isn't this what tiers are for?

You could probably work your way up to 5 star equipment in tier 1 alone, though it would take much longer.

Wed, 04/03/2013 - 19:05

Thimol

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Isn't this what tiers are for?

No.

You could probably work your way up to 5 star equipment in tier 1 alone,

And that's a problem. Precisely the sort of problem I'm griping about.

Wed, 04/03/2013 - 23:14

Klipik

The only way to work up to 5* equips in T1 alone is farming for money/buying CE and buying the equips at the AH. There isn't really any problem with that, it's your choice if you want to ruin the game's experience for yourself. No one else will suffer. The trick is making tier 1, 2 and 3 a well-paced learning curve so you don't hit a massive wall at T3 when everything gets exponentially harder, but you also don't skate through the entire game overgeared and without needing any semblance of skill. Right now, it's a bit o the worst of both as T3 (stratum 6 at least) is much harder than T2 and requires a lot of grinding time to get clearance, but once you get the good enough gear for s6 missions you are too good at the game be ause of the experience gained by grinding and you sail right through the endgame. Right now it's a stair-step, it should be a ramp that gets steeper as it goes up. But not too steep.

Thu, 04/04/2013 - 10:10

Thimol

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Personally, it's not the difficulty curve with which I have issue, though it could be (or could have been) described as a set of stairs with ramped steps. I'm talking about the difficulty of the game as a whole. Before the general nerfs, the progression of difficulty would jump up between tiers, but you could surmount that with time. I don't know about nowadays, however, but I imagine it's not any more difficult than it was. Not only that, but some monsters that didn't even need nerfs were nerfed anyway (e.g. wolvers), and some were just whisked away to a back alley and tenderly sodomized in only those ways that I would ever dream of (e.g. retrodes).

And, of course, you have things like the Royal Jelly being reduced to a pushover, an overall slow-down of the enemies, enemy weaknesses being conveniently handed to you by the monsters on a neat little paper slip, etc.

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The issue with difficulty