[SEEKING FEEDBACK] Designing Scalable Content

[strickolas]

Hey,

First time poster, long time lurker.

I'm making a wow server with a focus on horizontal progression, and I'm interested in people's ideas on how to go about implementing it.

My initial idea is to apply a zone debuff that artificially scales players down to the level of the zone that they're in. XP and gold rewards are scaled up to be competitive with current level content.

Another idea I have is to flatten stat increases and XP required to ding. For example, it could take 400 XP to get from level 1 to 2, and at level 2 you'd have 30 stamina. It could take 900 XP to get from level 79 to 80, and at level 80, you'd have 60 stamina. You'd still become more powerful over time, but not so much that it'd make it unfeasible to level with a friend of a Lower level. The downside of this is, it would be a ton of work to scale the XP received from all mobs, and quests.

Any thoughts? Poke holes in my ideas or come up with ones of your own. I'm interested in different perspectives!

 

[Zafire]

First of all, welcome to Emucoach!

Cool idea! I'd love to see it in action. But yes, scaling would probably take a lot of time to do. An idea I've always had is to scale all end-game content to level 10 (10 being max-level), meaning those 10 levels would of course be harder to obtain, so you'd essentially squeeze in all of the 1-80 into a 1-10. Although, 8 for example would be closer to 10 in regards of "power" I guess, compared to level 70 vs 80. If that makes any sense. It's an interesting topic, I am currently investigating in doing something similar for my own server.

 

[strickolas]

Yeah, I was debating scaling everything from 1-20, but the real issue seems to be stat explosion between levels. I think if you did 1-10, and scaled all end game content to be doable by a vanilla level 10, meaning like, 800 HP, 600 mana, etc -- then it might work!

Keep me informed of your experiments!