Lephys

Well, it's only really grindy if the game content isn't balanced well enough for you to find such gems and other components WHILST performing other tasks. I.e. if you have to travel to a cave and fight obstacles and whatnot JUST to find some components to craft something, there probably should've been some overlap on that cave, with some manner of quest or story bit, even if it's optional.

Ex-cisely! Pre-xactly!

Yeah, the one good thing I can say about DA2 is that they at least didn't divide all character interactions into purely "Right" and "Wrong." Even if you pissed them off and made decisions they didn't like and told them to deal with it, they just developed along a different path. Of course, that's kinda taking out the potentiality for them just-plain leaving you because you're literally spiting them, or you've just gotten their village murdered or something. I don't think that was necessary at all, to convert ALL negative interactions into a different benefit with no real consequences. I think all three should exist. You can influence them in a positive manner (relative to their nature... showing mercy might be good for some, and showing no mercy might be good for others), a negative manner, and a "you totally suck and I'm just doing things to spite you, now" manner. Well, I mean, IF the game design allows for such actions. Basically, I think it's overly simplistic and forced to provide you with 2 different companions who are SO far apart in their views that your decision to take the left corridor in a cave instead of the right makes one of them get upset, halts their follower relationship with you, and/or causes them to leave. Dragon Age: Origins was a good example of this. Every time you so much as looted a chest, someone was like "Oh my crap. Why did you give THAT person the mana potion? I HATE YOU SO HARD RIGHT NOW! * -10 points to Gryffindor*" Then, of course, you had that terrible "Would you want to romance me, perchance?" thing with Morrigan. And just saying "Nah, you're awesome, but no thanks, sorry." got you ridiculous amounts of negative points, which literally reduced her combat effectiveness in that game's systems. I don't know why everyone (exaggeration of so many game developers) insists on using a binary lightswitch with these things, instead of a 3-setting switch at the very least, or a dimmer knob.

I still think there are appropriate instances for misses. Josh hasn't yet addressed ranged attacks that I know of, but he specifically stated that they were still working out the system, and they were currently on getting melee combat situated, so... no biggie. Stuff takes time. It's pretty nice of Obsidian to provide us with rough drafts and get feedback as they go, when they COULD just work the whole thing out and not tell us boo. But, yeah, ranged attacks, spell effects (blind, etc.). All things that have been mentioned. Those would suffer a lot more from a lack of full missing than anything in melee range. That being said, the clear benefit is the reduction of the impact of chance on the outcome of the combat. You still have a chance to miss, true, but you no longer have a chance to make NO progress (well, extreme armor threshold aside, mayhaps). So, you still have a chance of making even BETTER progress with a critical hit, and a chance of making much worse progress with a miss, but chance is no longer going to say "Lolz... nothing happens!". I mean, that'd be the same as if a critical hit instantly killed, no matter what. Really. Sure, it's a tiny little immersion breaker. Between how used to it we are and how weird it seems to specifically think that it's impossible to ever not-strike someone with a melee attack, it hurts immersion a little. But, functionally, everything is the same, except that you're going to deal crappy damage instead of none now on the same roll. That and a bunch of numbers are balanced slightly differently now. You're still going to be fighting an ogre that was gonna do 70 damage to your 150 stamina, and he'll miss (or you'll dodge or block), and he'll only do 15 damage. And you're still going to have that little goblin deal 20 damage instead of 7 sometimes. Your probability is still in there, whole and happy. It just doesn't ever COMPLETELY negate whatever happened (excepting maybe the unaddressed things, like ranged attacks and spell effects). That isn't even taking into account the fact that the game's combat COULD involve a lot more active debilitation and positional strategy than other games that we're used to having the full misses in. Besides, Josh never swore he'd punt a thousand kittens before he'd EVER put misses into the system. If they end up needing to be in there, for whatever reason, they'll work 'em in. I have no doubts.

Crap... we're gonna hafta form... Forum Speculation Voltron! Everybody remember to turn your Cadillac keys at the exact same time. I don't want Voltron's head to be a thigh, like that one time... *sigh*

Haha. Yeah, I mean, realism isn't the right word. Maybe verisimilitude is closer. It's just... no matter what world you make, it inherits logic. Even if you're dealing with fictitious stuff. So, there's just only so far you can go with certain things. I mean, if your character can summon a moon to come crashing down on your foes like a meteor spell, it's not that "Hey, that's not realistic!". It's that "Hey, now the whole world exploded, and the world was where the story was taking place. That's kind of contradictory and nonsensical of a magic ability, within this world and setup, don't you think?" Now, obviously that's an extreme example, and obviously we've all got slightly different ideas of where the line actually is. My only real concern is that things don't get put in just because they're cool, you know? I don't mind everyone dual-wielding 15-blade Swordspheres, IF you make up some reason for that to happen. It doesn't have to be a perfect, fictitious physics 37-page dissertation or anything. And, if the whole rest of the world still holds true to "blades are very dangerous, and cutty accidents occur all the time," then it's not the impracticality of the weapon within real-world physics that breaks my immersion. It's the lack of coherency in the world. Same with 90-lb girls wielding flaming axes larger than themselves. That's fine by me, until you have absolutely no difference between an 8-foot-tall 400lb muscle mass of a person and that girl. If he can't wield something bigger, or his physical strength counts for nothing at all, you've got a problem. Especially if there's a "Strength" attribute that's different for the both of them. So, it just really has a lot to do with the context. And I don't think we're all trying to make sure everyone else accepts EXACTLY the same believability threshold as we do, here. Everyone's just stating, on a case-by-case basis, how they think the things we're mentioning regarding dual-wielding and what we've seen of it in existing games affect the believability of a fantasy world, from their perspective. That's all we can really do, since we don't know each other's exact perspectives. So, maybe we can collectively get a better sense of the mean, or at least some estimation of where "too fantastical" and "too bland" are.

True, Osvir. It's just that, so far, they haven't mentioned any damage that doesn't hit both your Stamina and your Health. So, I guess we're sort of discussing the possibility, until we hear otherwise. That isn't to say they aren't planning something and just haven't told us yet.

Well, it's more the system of allowing missing/evasion to be a significant aspect of character development. You know, when the Rogue gets like 20% evasion. You have instances of the Rogue getting 5 dodge rolls in a row, and slaying like 2 trolls. And, on the flip side, you have instances of his high evasion counting for nill when he gets hit 10 times in a row when you sent him into battle with the expectation of him dodging about 1-in-5 attacks. Then again, if you say "Okay, everyone gets like 2% evasion, MAX!", then hardly anyone cares about the fact that evasion's still in. It becomes a cake crumb. So, I see their reasoning. And you've still got varied damage. Especially with the way they're handling the damage range, what with a "block" or whatever we're going to call an until-recently-called-"miss" dealing not half of whatever damage you happened to do, but specifically half of your MINIMUM damage. And crits will be doing 1.5X (I'm sure that's just a base) your MAX damage. So, that gives you the damage fluctuation. Really, the only difference that matters at least to the function of gameplay is that the damage and HP values will have to be balanced in accordance with always-hit damage in mind. In other words, even if the 0-damage situations are gone, you can reduce the damage ceiling on crits and best-case scenarios and still be dealing with the same combat times and health pools and such, really. My only question is: Why not simply eliminate the RNG from evasion, and link it to active skills and such? Not super-crazy twitchy things. Like setup skills (block-and-counter, etc.). I mean, they've already said the Rogue gets Reversal, which sort of parries the next incoming attack (and the Rogue takes reduced damage), then has him roll around behind his opponent. Why not use things like that, instead? Again, though, we don't know what else they're planning for combat. It might be disable-heavy, with lots of "you basically can't attack me for this duration, so it's the same thing as me dodging" moves. As long as such things are short and require intelligent use, rather than traditional "stun-lock" systems, I don't see us losing anything that isn't getting made up for in gratuitous helpings of awesome. Also... something else to consider in an evasion-less system: Traps. Are our characters completely unable to duck beneath giant swinging axe blades or streams of poison darts? Does a trap system work with 0% evasion? Perhaps. I just didn't think about traps until now.

It's kind of almost like a fantasy version of sci-fi's AIs. I think if they're done well, they're a great addition. I don't really see the need to have them all act like actual people, though. Much like AIs tend to not act like "people." Even when they start developing desires and emotions and all that jazz. They aren't sarcastic, sassy people with dicing problems or something. I mean, that can be fun, but, I think a lot can be achieved with a very non-human personality. Like Legion in the Mass Effect games.

Indubidably. . I always hated that. "You do 1d4. But you critted! You rolled a 1... YOU DID 2 DAMAGE! YES!" That's a perfect example, though, of the kinds of unintentional downsides to RNG that they're trying to avoid. I respect that goal. Just as long as they aren't doing it "just because." You know... "I don't wanna do the laundry, so I burned all my clothes. PROBLEM SOLVED!" Haha. Not that I have so little faith in them, I'm sure the splendor of P:E combat, in its finality, will make up for anything I miss (pun intended) in a system without misses.

It doesn't necessarily have to ride on RNG. But, removing the ability to completely negate (or, in this case, avoid) damage removes a strategic element from combat. Especially with ranged projectiles, which haven't really been specifically addressed by Josh, like I said. It's not THAT big of a deal. The results are the same, really, from a game-mechanical standpoint. But, if you always take at least some damage, then you've got a world in which nothing ever physically misses anything else. Ever. That's just a little weird. I dunno. Josh did say "Not currently, no." Also, we don't really know what other factors will be involved. If the combat's designed from the ground up with that in mind, then we might see all the pros with pretty much no cons.

The question is, if you think he's being unreasonable in his expectations for realism, then what level of contextual realism would no longer be acceptable? Obviously they can't implement a different level of it for every single player, or the game wouldn't be coherent. So, SOME level of it must be agreed upon in making a game, whether it's none, full, or somewhere in-between. Why not a sword that shoots dragons out? Or why not just allow everything to be a weapon? "I shall smite you with this PLOW!" I think it can be agreed that if someone had a sword that had 15 other swords jutting out in various directions from its blade, that would be ridiculous. Not "It just so happens that a poll reveals that people don't prefer that, and therefore we shouldn't put it in the game." Everything gamers want in a game isn't always a good design decision, so "as long as people want it" isn't really a good basis for all design decisions. It's a factor to consider, but so is contextual realism.

A very basic improvement to commonly-implemented systems would be to have stages of morale loss in between "FOR SPARTA!" and "I'M RUNNING HOME TO RE-HYDRATE SO THAT I CAN FINISH PEEING MY PANTS!". Especially with groups. Maybe 12 bandits think they have you outnumbered. You take down 4 of them, they start to lose certainty, and fight more cautiously and less aggressively. Or, maybe there's even a small chance that, as their morale drops, they start making desperation attacks like a cornered animal. And finally, at certain points, maybe they start to turn and run. However complex they wanna go with it, I think that, at the very least, "back away and re-think your strategy" should come before "run until you die." It just seems to toggle between "I'm completely fine with charging you head-on" and "Oh crap, I better get as far away from you as possible!" in most games, heh. Sometimes it toggles right back after they run about 50 feet, and perhaps regain some health *coughELDERSCROLLScough*. Or, you know, they "yield," only to get back up and rush you after they have 10 more hitpoints, even though you just slew like 5 deities right in front of them.

I'm not against removing the always-present % chance to dodge/miss, but I don't know that necessarily excludes ALL instances of dodging/missing completely. I mean, what about parrying? There's absolutely no parrying now? Or, everyone's so incompetent that they can NEVER parry a blade well enough for it not to cut into their shoulder? From a mechanic function standpoint, it's fine. But, I dunno... it kinda messes with immersion a bit. And what about ranged weapons? If you're running across a field at full sprint, and some rookie bandit with a makeshift crossbow spots you and lets fly a bolt, it ALWAYS grazes you? I'm really just wondering, because I know Josh was just answering specific questions and didn't say "Here's literally everything there is to our miss/mitigation system, and we're totally done designing it!" I'll tell you how they could kill 2 birds with one stone, though... Work the whole "Stamina damage only, no health damage" thing into the block/dodge system. It would fit perfectly with that, and now there would be a way in which to mitigate health damage. After all, if you've parried or dodged what was meant to tear into your abdomen (or through your armor), why would it cause health damage? But, maybe between the dodge, or the force of the blow through your armor, you'd still lose stamina. Obviously balancing is in order, along with all the other contextual design factors, but it makes sense at-a-glance.

I'd just like to point out up-front that we don't really know all there is to know about the "armor" system, per se. We just know how the "damage" system works, specifically, and how it relates to armor. So, even though higher armor always limits the damage or, at the very least, restricts the threatening weapons list, it may not be that wearing heavier armor is necessarily better. But, honestly, I think, so far so good.

I think the Witcher 2 did this. It wasn't really a tooltip, but you could look up creature info in your journal after having fought several of a creature, or you could purchase books that informed you about the creatures. I think each creature had 3 levels of knowledge. They simply showed up in your journal as descriptive paragraphs about behavior, weaknesses (i.e. "This thing will not succumb to bleeding damage due to its physiology"). It was pretty nice, although pretty basic. Sometimes it affected quests and such. Another possible implementation would be for your character to gain bonuses against certain creatures after enough direct combat experience with them. You could simplify it to slayings, or you could break it up into categories. It would be something that would make sense with the whole "Your character would obviously gain some progressive knowledge in dealing with this particular creature" notion. An example would be that one character may have fought 10 bears, and maybe he gains a +5% evasion when fighting bears, because he's dealt with their movements and such so many times. And it's not like bears are out there coming up with crazy different strategies and martial arts of their own, so their patterns are going to pretty much rely on instinct and bear DNA, and thus will remain fairly constant. Or maybe your Wizard learns to deal more magic damage against Shadow Fiends or something, after pelting them with so many spells and noticing certain places to aim/certain focuses of the spell. *shrug* That said, I'm all for things it's expected for the player to learn via your character's experience being handily stored by your character, rather than having to be constantly kept track of by you. It's similar to when I find some door I know I can't get into (and will have to come back to) in some game, but I have NO way of marking that on a map. The worst is when you go out of town for a week or so, and you come back, load your game and say "Wait... where was that rune I saw?" or "I can't remember if axes or spears were extra effective against these guys!". Nothing is really gained by the player's ability to forget such information, while you'd expect the characters to know better (i.e. just record that info somewhere, as it relates to the player's ability to access it.)

Yes! I mean, what if you could enchant a sword to cause any living thing within 10 feet of you to glow? Perhaps it would be costly, or wouldn't be quite as murdery as other weaponry, but it would give you a huge advantage against melee stealth combatants and ambush situations. This is a very rough example, intended to spur excitement and brainstorming, maybe even parades. Probably not parades...

They should probably add in traits and skills specifically for romance. Then, romance could be like Stealth! "How'd you get to that chest if you don't pick locks or have a key?" "I passed my romance check on the guard!" "AWESOME!" Humor aside, the relationship-to-romance spectrum is pretty broad. The only problem I have with "OMG definitely no!" stance is that a world full of people who never develop any level of fondness for one another, despite constantly saving each other's lives and whatnot, is a dull, dull world. It would be similar to hating the idea of building snowmen in the game, and being against the existence of snow in the game world so that no snowmen could ever be built.

Yours and Karkarov's posts are vastly different, but they're both still posts.

It's possible that everything not-constructive that can be said on this topic has already been said, as well.

Well, hopefully the rest of the people left who aren't going to read my words will simply leave it at that, rather than tacking on the extra step of "and then responding anyway." *Crosses fingers* Luckily for us, the discussion isn't about Valorian. It's about level-scaling, which we happened to be talking about. Thus, on spins the world. I'm with you on that, Ganrich. I think there was something briefly mentioned in one of the Q&As about using more than just a level increase to scale challenge. And, who knows, they might have some awesome plan that doesn't really need any scaling at all. They're pretty skilled developers. Either way, though, I think it's much more interesting to change the encounters a bit without just adding in heaps of hit points and damage. But, there are so many things that are affected by levels, it's hard not to at least change some of it, in an applicable instance. The funny thing is, even though Oblivion gets so much flak for their brutal level scaling, they actually had a slider to adjust it. Not that it's the player's responsibility to fix it or anything, heh. But, You can do it on a curve, and it works pretty well (assuming your game has problems that level-scaling is capable of addressing.) Say Goblins are level 3 and your party is now level 30. Well, Goblins might be scaled such that they are now level 10. You can still increase their numbers a bit (which is one reason they don't go up to, say... 20 or something) and throw in various extra types of goblins in goblin encounters, but now each goblin won't be killed by gentle wafting breeze of your blade swinging past them on an attack miss. They're still ridiculously easy, but combat will still provide some manner of challenge, and Goblins will still be usable for lore purposes as combatants even later in the game. Now, obviously, if you don't need to use Goblins later in the game, depending on your story and your lore, then you wouldn't need to apply any scaling to Goblins, really. Which brings up the other bit, that scaling should only be used when the player could approach an encounter or quest at a range of possible levels. But, you could even scale things that are meant to be higher-level than you (like bosses), if they're able to be taken on after varying amounts of optional character progression. If a boss is level 20, and your party is level 22, maybe the boss is now level 23. Perhaps if you'd gone out of your way less to procure quest rewards and various XP gains, you'd be about lvl 15 when you got to the boss. So, now the boss is easier, in relation to your levels (22 vs. 23 instead of 15 vs. 20), but the scaling has prevented him from being lower level than you, and therefore MUCH easier. Again, perhaps this isn't necessary, or doesn't work well with the rest of the factors in P:E, but that's how I see it working. Not a straight line, but a curve, and only where needed. Well, just to point out how this would make sense in relation to scaling, everyone in P:E has super amazetastic souls, so to think that the players can become 30 times more powerful than a group of murderous bandits who survive in a forest hideout amid various hostile creatures is starting to stretch it. If you let the power relation get TOO wide, then you start losing touch with your game world. You'd have to be fighting nothing but nether demons and demigods at that point, because you can fell an entire bandit outpost with your boot. If it's assumed time is passing as you travel about and accomplish feats and the story unfolds, then it makes sense for the bandits to develop a bit, too. That's all. Probably not exactly as much as you did, but some. Yes! Dragon Age 2 was one of the worst instances of this I've ever seen. I tried playing it on the hardest "difficulty," and it was pretty much impossible. It was a simple matter of numbers. Everyone in your group had about 500 hitpoints, and the first boss had about 100,000. And I think in 10 minutes of fighting him, when I died (time after time after time), I got him down about 20%. He had completely undodgable attacks and everything. *sigh*. So ridiculous. On the other hand Mass Effect 2 on Insanity had it's uber-ridiculous parts, but then Mass Effect 3 wasn't very bad at all. It was extremely challenging. You had to position your squad well, and use your abilities efficiently (you could produce different combo effects with different character's abilities that were useful in different situations), but it was a lot more tactical. It wasn't just "OMG HEAL AND EXTEND YOUR HELTHS UNTIL YOU DO LOTS OF DAMAGEZ!", haha. So, yeah, I definitely hate that "Let's just multiply everything by 20" way of approaching difficulty.

Oh man... I've really gotta use the restroom, but, I'm not sure the pause is worth the risk! o_o The only valid, reasonable argument you have is "People shouldn't be allowed extra time to think about things. They should just think faster." Because that's all pausing does, besides provide convenience when returning to your game from a restroom break as opposed to re-launching the EXE and loading your save just to get back to the game after a 5-minute break. How is it a "game changer"? Does pausing enhance your spell damage? Does it give you more attacks in the same amount of game time? What do you think's going to happen if someone has pause limits, and they have trouble keeping up with combat, and they make a mistake that they COULD'VE fixed by pausing the action and issuing command changes to the party, and their party all dies? I suspect they'll re-load the game and try again. And again, and again. Unless of course you think we should institute load limits. "Nope... you can only re-load the game once per day. Sorry. You'll have to try again tomorrow, u_u." I hate to tell you, but humans have different speeds of tactical processing. We've all got different brains. So, unless you plan on arguing that people who think more slowly are inherently stupid and crappy people who don't deserve to get to play a game just because YOU want to limit your own pauses to challenge yourself to think faster, then there's absolutely no reason to limit pausing (and definitely no good reason).

You're right. If people don't want something, then it logically can't possibly accomodate their interests. That's why, if you took a pool, asking how many people want to pay taxes, I'm sure 100% would say "I LOVE TAXES! 8D". Because, you know, people aren't capable of being unreasonable. Or, if you break your leg and go to the doctor, and he says he needs to set the bone right then and there with no anesthetic or it won't heal correctly and you'll lose the ability to walk on it, everyone says "Awesome! Go for it, man!" and gives him a big thumbs up and a smile. No one could possibly react to the current level of pain and fail to see past that, and tell the doctor "No, no I don't want you to!" Logically, logic class was everyone's forte. Also, P:E will only be played by 600 people. The very 600 that answered in that poll, who are all perfectly logical and couldn't possibly be basing their decision off of very specific things they don't like about bad implementations of level scaling.

Look, man... All I'm doing is simply observing observably true things. I don't know why your responses are so laden with "Ha-HAH! MY thing wins and YOURS is feces!!!" Not only are your words pretty devoid of reason, but I'm not even talking about things that I personally crafted on a logical pottery wheel out of some opinion-clay. It doesn't even matter if P:E uses level-scaling or not. I'm here to discuss "Level Scaling and Its Misuse." And that's what I'm doing. Of course I'm comparing level-scaling and difficulty. It's literally the same concept. Assuming "Normal" is the point of origin, the difficulty setting LITERALLY scales (look up the definiton of the word scale) the difficulty of the game (which is heavily based upon groupings of numerical values called "levels") throughout an entire instance of play. What does it matter if the level of that goblin in that cave was prophesied by a magical, talking Leopluradon 3 million years ago, or if it was determined 3 seconds before your computer loaded it on-screen? The goblin's either as challenging as it's intended to be, or it isn't. That's what matters. You give me a non-level-scaled system and write down all the levels of all the creatures and opponents throughout the entire game in a spreadsheet, and I guarantee you there's a mathematical formula in existence that can derive those EXACT same values, throughout the entire game, purely from the player's level at the time. So, the only difference is HOW you do the math. It's all just math. Lots of it. Also: A) Point out ONE place in which I stated that a slider for level-scaling would be impossible, and that there wouldn't be one. B) Explain to me how level-scaling, in all it's terrible, ferocious awfulness, is immune to being altered by difficulty settings. Please. I would really love to know how it is logically impossible for the level-scaling formula to shift to produce lower output values for Easy and higher ones for Hard. Actually, it is. You clearly misunderstood the point (or just didn't care about it in the first place, *shrug*). My point was that, even if you have 1,000,000,000 different branches at some point, and choosing one of them eliminates the availability of all the other paths, that doesn't change the fact that if you choose ZERO of those paths, you gain absolutely nothing in character advancement. Therefore, unless you require all things to be done, your level calculations that you made at the outset of the game for all encounters throughout are going to have to be based on the assumption that: A)The player completes ALL content. B)The player completes NO optional content and only gets advancement from the mandatory content. C)The player completes some amount of optional content. You stated that you feel balancing it with approximately 75% of the completed content in mind is a pretty good idea. And, you know what? If you're going to do a game that way, then that's probably not a bad guesstimate. I wouldn't mind playing a game like that. However, that doesn't change the fact that you're still going to have some people do 50% of the "optional" stuff, or less, and the game's going to be impossible. You say "Well, good, those people suck, and they should've done 75% of it." Well, that sounds grade when you're just talking percentages and numbers and generic content. But, there are reasons for people to not want to do quite that much of it. Perhaps 10% of it contains complex puzzles, and someone's really bad with puzzles. Maybe another 15% involves lots of exploration, and someone doesn't like super-meticulous exploration. Maybe there's some based on lore. Maybe someone doesn't like to super-read all the lore that much. Basically, you add all those things together, and you probably aren't going to get an exact number. And, principally, if you're going to let players choose, then it's a bit silly to say "You get to decide how to handle these situations that could easily go uhandled from a story standpoint, but you have to handle 75% of them PURELY because you need your damage and armor to be high enough for the last boss!" That's the same concept as the turn-based RPGs of old (final fantasy) with unlimited experience and ridiculously difficult bosses. I mean, that's pretty much how the term "grind" came about. You do things PURELY to make sure you're high enough level, rather than because they need doing and/or you'd like to do them. Annnnnnd, you've still got the fact that the people who are going to do 100% of all the available optional content. What about them? Based on your "reasoning" regarding the whole "if you have a level range of 6-12 for an enemy, and it's level 6, you're scaling it DOWN to level 6" thing, you're scaling that 100%-ers challenge DOWN to the 75%-er's level, thereby ruining their experience. They didn't necessarily explore everything and complete every quest SO THAT the final bit of the game would be drastically easier, and yet it is! Doesn't matter what your opinion is, or what my opinion is... that's an unintended effect right there, and that's the truth. So, you can either say "SCREW YOU" to those people who want to make the most out of the developers' hard work, or you can use some form of adjustment, aka "scaling" to remedy that. Talk about "ruining your experience." Or you can just balance the game for 100% completion. Problem solved, since you don't care about the people who complete LESS than the 75% estimate. That wouldn't be inherently wrong. That would just be a game that basically provides no optional content. It would all be critical content. It just may not work as well. Another observable dilemma... If stuff's optional, but the final boss's difficulty assumes you've completed 75% of the "optional" content, then what happens when someone completes 60% and gets to the end of the game and can't even come close to beating the final boss? Are they supposed to just start the whole game over and complete more content? Does the game FORCIBLY make sure they complete that 75% before they get to the final boss, to remedy things? If so, how is that not linear? If it's because of the extra 25%, then we're back to the down-scaling for completionists problem. If you don't see why someone thought up level-scaling one day by now, and that it isn't inherently feces, then I don't know what else to say, really. You've actually explained why about 0 times. All you've done is pointed out blatantly terrible implementations of level-scaling, and/or a few of its potential cons (depending on how, exactly, it's done), then said "and therefore, i.e. it logically follows that it is feces because I believe it is, u_u!" Feces doesn't change when you wrap it with a pretty package, you're right. Which is precisely why I never said we should wrap feces with a pretty package. If you spent more time logically deducing how the scaling of numbers is inherently feces and less time trying to convince me that feces cannot be alchemically transmuted into gold, we might be getting somewhere. And actually, it is sort of your problem, depending on how you look at it, because I'm here in search of a greater mutual understanding of the topic being discussed. So, every word you type with a blatant disregard for anyone else's understanding in mind is another thing for me to scour for reason. You see, even if you don't care to read other people's words, I actually read all of yours, because I didn't decide that you're wrong before you began typing. I evaluate on-the-fly, kind of like level-scaling, 8D!

Wands are pretty silly. But how great would it be to bump into an eccentric Wandsman?