Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

That wasn't meant to taunt players or to say you have no right to complain about the way gameplay feels, just that it's important to express your beliefs about the systems with a little humility and to be gentle when criticizing content that people worked hard on. It will make the devs a lot more receptive to your feedback. I'm pretty sure most of them gave up a few posts into this thread, and I'm trying to teach you how to avoid that.

On a hopefully more constructive note:

The general consensus seems to be that the MMO spawner feels janky and sometimes arbitrary. (... Which I guess is living up to its name. ) If there are perception checks involved in deciding whether NPCs spawn in a given section of the map, those checks have one or more of the following issues:

• DCs may be too high for the zone's CR. (Citation needed. I'm not actually sure I have any decent spotters on my roster... but I adventure with all sorts, so who knows?)
• DCs are evaluated independently of the mobs being spawned. Thus, a mage with 0 Hide/MS ranks gets the same spawn DC as a rogue with 33 ranks in both.
• Is it possible that a single failed check is enough to allow a spawn, even if other people in that area passed their perception checks? (Or worse, if the same person passed Spot but not Listen or vice versa?) It might account for why I notice no negative correlation between having spotters in the party and mobs spawning on top of us.

There's also an innate sense of grindiness to it. You clear out a map, and unless you're obscenely fast in doing so, you'll be able to circle round and do it all over again - which unfortunately seems to be the default method of leveling on BG. I'd prefer to trigger spawns much more infrequently, in exchange for making the existing spawns harder and more rewarding to kill. For instance:

Let's say Map X has spawn points laid out in this sequence: A --- B --- C. The spawns are sufficiently far apart that a party should generally not be able to pick a fight with two spawn points at once. However, they respawn quickly enough that a party can circle back from C to A without downtime. Breaking this circle by increasing the respawn timer will have a sizable impact on XP gains, which can be resolved (or not resolved, though this may result in backlash from some player groups) using one or more of the following methods as appropriate for the map:

• Increase the amount of NPCs at each spawn point. This makes them more challenging, and also enables offensive spellcasters to derive some actual benefit from their AoE spells.
• Increase the XP per kill. This may require you to first raise the XP cap from the current blanket value of 50 XP.
• Increase the amount of spawn points: A - D - B - E - C. Optionally, spawns D and E can be positioned such that a careless party would find themselves in constant combat until they cleared all five spawns. Depending on the details, this could make for a fast-paced battle, or allow you to punish the party for charging blindly at the enemy without consideration for their surroundings.

So if I'm hearing this right:
- Spawns appearing on top of players without any indication of why is annoying
- Spawns occur too fast, making things feel grindy
- It's not fun that most creatures have a ton of health but aren't very challenging

I have a number of very non-optimal characters (for RP reasons). For the most part, "level-appropriate" is a lot less important here than in an MMO.

If your character can't handle level-appropriate stuff solo, then don't. I had one character still running Gibberlings at level 10, but another that moved on around level 5. Because the level 5 could handle himself elsewhere, but the level 10 still struggled against harder stuff. It worked. The mechanics don't force you to face a fully "level-appropriate" threat. Sure, you get less XP/hr, but the RP is just as valid (and RP really cuts into the difference in efficiency). And less loot, but most of the time that's not terribly important.

Nothing says you have to be soloing the hardest stuff of your CR. An int11 pure mage should struggle to do so against the hardest level appropriate stuff, for very valid reasons. Besides, at the high end, your character shouldn't be soloing the Balor or Dracolich (although some apparently can). And difficulty melts away in groups (it's hard to the point of being entirely unreasonable to expect we can balance this stuff for group content, how diverse groups can be).

So, IMO, the primary goal of balance should be "Easy enough that there's somewhere any reasonable build can at least make some progress". Which this servers' devs/GMs have easily exceeded. (So tons of props to them for that!)

That's not to say there aren't ways to make things *better* (with the understanding that, IMO, it'd be going from good to gooder (gooder is a word if I use it as such!) (the only thing worse than nested parentheses is multiple child instances in the same parent)). With that thought, there's a lot of ideas in this thread to make a great game better.

One great example for this is high-CR mages should still feel like mages. This means that a Mage NPC should not simply be "CR{x} mob + spells". Their defenses (aside from things like Will save) shouldn't scale nearly as much as the same CR's brutes an soldiers. This is more an immersion thing than a balance thing, but a human mage NPC should have roughly the same survivability as a PC mage. Yes, this means they die fast (if their magics/friends don't intervene), but they should. This isn't an MMO where TTK needs to be within a few points of each other. (This should only apply to CR-based defenses - a Fire Giant spellcaster should have defenses well beyond a human mage, although not as high as their soldiers. It's a very difficult balancing act.)

It'd also make them "feel" more like a mage if they had a rotating, or better yet random, spell list. Suddenly, each mage is it's own beast. Some will go invisible, others will displace, some will just nuke, etc, etc. But that's a lot harder/more work than rebalancing their defensive stats, I think.

- Spawns appearing on top of players without any indication of why is annoying
Yes, it is annoying. I only noticed this happening quite often recently, was never an issue during all the years.

- Spawns occur too fast, making things feel grindy
No, bring them on. Or better have different spawn times in different regions - as some regions should be more dangerous than others.

bharring wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 8:51 am I have a number of very non-optimal characters (for RP reasons). For the most part, "level-appropriate" is a lot less important here than in an MMO.

If your character can't handle level-appropriate stuff solo, then don't. I had one character still running Gibberlings at level 10, but another that moved on around level 5. Because the level 5 could handle himself elsewhere, but the level 10 still struggled against harder stuff. It worked.

Somewhat of an extreme example, I think, but IMO, the level 10 should have still been able to bloody the noses of the harder stuff you were referring to.

The mechanics don't force you to face a fully "level-appropriate" threat. Sure, you get less XP/hr, but the RP is just as valid (and RP really cuts into the difference in efficiency). And less loot, but most of the time that's not terribly important.

The way the loot system works? You do need to do level-appropriate content, or come to terms with being locked out of half of the server economy.

Nothing says you have to be soloing the hardest stuff of your CR. An int11 pure mage should struggle to do so against the hardest level appropriate stuff, for very valid reasons. Besides, at the high end, your character shouldn't be soloing the Balor or Dracolich (although some apparently can). And difficulty melts away in groups (it's hard to the point of being entirely unreasonable to expect we can balance this stuff for group content, how diverse groups can be).

I would generally agree with this. I do tend to favor leaving some wiggle room for those of us whose timezones make it prohibitively difficult to party up (... like me), but I think there should be some content at any level that should be unsoloable for characters of that level.

So, IMO, the primary goal of balance should be "Easy enough that there's somewhere any reasonable build can at least make some progress". Which this servers' devs/GMs have easily exceeded. (So tons of props to them for that!)

I agree on the goal, but I'm a little uncertain as to whether it's been met. At the same time, I also think that there is such a thing as being able to make too much progress - for instance, the abovementioned example of being able to solo balors and dracoliches - and feel that measures should be taken to limit this.

One great example for this is high-CR mages should still feel like mages. This means that a Mage NPC should not simply be "CR{x} mob + spells". Their defenses (aside from things like Will save) shouldn't scale nearly as much as the same CR's brutes an soldiers. This is more an immersion thing than a balance thing, but a human mage NPC should have roughly the same survivability as a PC mage. Yes, this means they die fast (if their magics/friends don't intervene), but they should. This isn't an MMO where TTK needs to be within a few points of each other. (This should only apply to CR-based defenses - a Fire Giant spellcaster should have defenses well beyond a human mage, although not as high as their soldiers. It's a very difficult balancing act.)

It'd also make them "feel" more like a mage if they had a rotating, or better yet random, spell list. Suddenly, each mage is it's own beast. Some will go invisible, others will displace, some will just nuke, etc, etc. But that's a lot harder/more work than rebalancing their defensive stats, I think.

Absolutely. NPC mages combine the endurance of regular NPCs with spellcasting capabilities, making them flat-out superior even while they pretend to be on the same power level as the others.

gedweyignasia wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 8:22 am So if I'm hearing this right:
- Spawns appearing on top of players without any indication of why is annoying

Not necessarily "annoying" as such, since you can learn to anticipate it to an extent, but definitely hard to ICly justify.

- Spawns occur too fast, making things feel grindy

The grindiness stems from a combination of rapid respawning and low rewards, really. You're encouraged to just circle through the same map as many times as the game lets you, until you either die of boredom or level up.

- It's not fun that most creatures have a ton of health but aren't very challenging

While true, the ton of health can itself be challenging for some builds that can't deal a lot of damage. It can also exaggerate the challenge level of mobs that are otherwise threatening, like the NPC mages.

DaloLorn wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 9:43 am

bharring wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 8:51 am The mechanics don't force you to face a fully "level-appropriate" threat. Sure, you get less XP/hr, but the RP is just as valid (and RP really cuts into the difference in efficiency). And less loot, but most of the time that's not terribly important.

The way the loot system works? You do need to do level-appropriate content, or come to terms with being locked out of half of the server economy.

I can certainly see how the loot system -could- break that model. Which is a concern that should be taken very seriously. I overstated, as I haven't seen it in -my- experience. Which is, of course, limited. Any mechanics that push you towards "level-appropriate" content need to be limited and careful.

The server's difficulty didn't change much over the years simply because the mobs themselves weren't touched. The last significant change was a slight scaling (in terms of level) of the mobs with your level and party size. The goal was to give people more areas to play with at any given level and provide a bit more challenge. Possibly because of a more complete mechanical knowledge of the server devs were unanimously thinking that the server was boringly easy and that this would be funnier for everybody.

Apparently not, and now there seems to be the unexpected consequence of people staying longer in the very same grind zones thanks to the scaling. We're going to collect some data for a couple of weeks to be sure of the diagnosis, if confirmed scaling will likely be reduced as well as some other ideas tweaked.

Other than that and as it was noted a couple of times some character archetypes struggle somewhat, blasters, because mobs are indeed generally set with high HP. With reignite invocation that issue is much less important though and the issue can otherwise be alleviated by making areas with mobs who are weak against magical damage but not against physical.

Some other notes : save or die spells exist, why should PvE be devoid of any such threats ? The claim of such spells being widespread is largely false (completely false). Dispellers : same idea, we have so very few of them now, expect more not less, however with lesser CL, such as normal or lesser dispel. As for spellcasters with Bigby spells again they're not exactly widespread either and much like save or die spells they exist. NPCs casters typically have damage spells.

Another thing about casters : it's not everywhere but casters have different spellbooks, the way it's done is tedious though because it's one creature blueprint per spell selection. As for spawners we have different systems and everything needed for more group encounters, however such things are more difficult for players, not easier.

During the last years the power creep has overwhelmingly been in favor of players, through ever more powerful custom PRCs, ever more numerous epic shops, ever more plentiful loot and gold (despite the claims of some), ever faster XP gains. A consequence is that the power difference between a fully optimized powerbuild and a casual RP build with little money grew much larger than it used to be, resulting in plenty of issues for DMs as well as players rightfully feeling they have mechanically weak characters.

A possible solution is heavy nerf bat usage on many things.

A couple small points:

The loot system has a fair amount of leeway. You can loot areas several CR levels below your own. There was an issue right around level 12ish or so when it was first implemented but as far as I know that has been addressed.

1) Loot

Best thing to do in terms of looting is provide specific feedback. Examples of what level you are currently playing and what areas still provide a challenge but no longer offer loot is more helpful than general criticism.

2) Spawn Rate

A high spawn rate can make an area seem grindy, but on the flip side a low spawn rate in highly trafficked areas can also be an issue. If entering and area another group/player just left and it sits empty is the other side of that coin.

Valefort wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 1:22 pm
A possible solution is heavy nerf bat usage on many things.

Viva la Valefort! Can I play this game??!!??

Imho, 30 is just a number. 13 could be “The” number. So could 21.

What I mean is we “struggle” to reach some artificial number, and then we are stuck. End of the road.

On BGTSCC, levels 1–20 are a breeze. The a grind sets in for the last 10. But it could very well be designed that a challenge exists from 1–21, or 1–13 even, and the GOAL is to progressively appreciate every small achievement in the process. NOT just GO GO GO for the end game, then get bored, quit or jaded.

IMHO, a better RP experience and a better Server IS one with challenge (re: difficulty), but NOT one with such a long road. I also think that a better Server and a better experience is one where the separation between Level Beginning and Level Ending is not so ridiculously large (lvl 1s and 30s in the same milieu is NOT how D&D was designed to be played, FYI).

Certain archetypes in Builds will just do better on BGTSCC because the NWN2 mechanics combined with server design do not faithfully challenge the multitude of aspects of a Character. An example, how Social Skills play little to no Role in the game except for the rare DM event (maybe even then not).

If one really wants to see a difficult server environment, make it one where all aspects of the Character Sheet count, and not just the AC/AB/DMG part.

I believe the Devs and Staff are smart and capable of making powerful changes toward a richer experience, but alas, I’d say few in the community can or want to deal with change (let alone Epic Change).

At least dreams are free.

Steve wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 1:50 pm Imho, 30 is just a number. 13 could be “The” number. So could 21.

30 is the number for the server. Any character can choose any number <30 and have that be their number. RP should not begin or end at 30.

gedweyignasia wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 3:51 pm

Steve wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 1:50 pm Imho, 30 is just a number. 13 could be “The” number. So could 21.

30 is the number for the server. Any character can choose any number <30 and have that be their number. RP should not begin or end at 30.

Absolutely!

However, the Server doesn't support that very well.

How do you mean?

gedweyignasia wrote: ↑Fri Sep 03, 2021 3:58 pm How do you mean?

Is it the 1% that can literally sit out a complete RP experience at lvl 5.

I'm sorry; I still don't understand.