How about a softcore server?

[PaleFox]

You still get to live once but:
- No multiclassing
- Normal difficulty only
- Auto level when you have enough xp to do so
- Can't replay quests
- Explorer zones and challenges can be replayed
- No rerolling
- No Fred
- No Trainers

 

[calouscaine]

Exactly, but without hard measurements from something like a softcore server everything we write down here is just anecdotal and nothing to rely on. The baseline should be normal at level and scale the game from there.
But what we have now as a baseline is Elite from HC, Reaper from normal servers, both with highly twinked out characters and on normal servers with a vast amount of past lives.
Btw, from my perspective any group of characters should be able to complete a normal quest at level. Should be able to recover between fights and should only fail because of sheer unluck, rushing, no team play or just plain stupid behavior.
If well played and characters still die on this softcore then a quest should be put up for review or possibly some other game mechanic.

Another nice catch is that a normal only mode means that it is way more friendly for new players.

I get what you're saying here, but you can do that on a normal server just fine. I myself only have two or three past life characters, and none of them are completionists with my over a decade of playing, and I've only recently gotten into reaper on two of those characters and under five points so far.
With hc season 8 I ran dungeons at level or two levels above from normal, hard, and elite to gauge how well my char would do to minimize risk and to refamiliarize myself with the dungeons I rarely play (mostly the old content, easy to level up when below ten).
I'm not sure if there are a lot of people with massive reincarnations, even with ottos boxes it would take a boat load of money to try and speed through all of them, and with out the boxes it takes a long time even if you're going at it every day for hours at a time. I think my most 'twinked' out char would be my arty, with four racials, two epic, and two iconic, at one life a piece, which equates to very little since there's no stat buff or bonus enhancement points yet.
But, with my first lifer on hc, I spent a large amount of time rerunning dungeons for gear so that I wouldn't have to worry about the next 1-5 levels above me dungeons (unless they were on reaper, still trying to get the hang of that, it's pretty rough when you don't have points in it).
I do have about five or six first life characters on my normal server, and the type or level of dungeon they can handle is based on how I built them and their gear, some of which are just play around toons and as such can't do anything above normal. But, some are built to simply kill every and bull doze through traps and can tank elite from level 1 on. With ddo there's a huge variance between what one char can do compared to another simply based on how you did your stats, skills, enhancements, and what you're wearing. I would imagine it's pretty difficult to balance a dungeon across the board for their dev team given how different every character could be, which is one reason why nerfs happen.
It's also pretty difficult to make a character who can do anything, not impossible, but pretty difficult and requires multiclassing. . .though it seems like multi classing might be getting discouraged with toggles not working together on some things after the last two weeks down times.

 

[PyrotechRick]

So the proposal is a "softcore" server that acts as a kind of test server to balance the game around? But this server will have different rules to the main servers? If that's the case how can anything balanced on that server be certain of being balanced on the main servers when the different set of parameter's are applied?

 

[PaleFox]

So the proposal is a "softcore" server that acts as a kind of test server to balance the game around? But this server will have different rules to the main servers? If that's the case how can anything balanced on that server be certain of being balanced on the main servers when the different set of parameter's are applied?

It's about the baseline and work from there.

I expect it to be challenging in a different way then hardcore as there will be level ranges where we fall short on xp and are forced to enter quests under level.

 

[RangerOne]

I read softcore and thought something different.

 

[PyrotechRick]

PaleFox, I think that the title of your thread has confused me and probably others. You aren't really proposing another server, softcore or otherwise. You are proposing that the whole game should be balanced around leveling from level 1 to cap by only doing quests once on normal difficulty. That's a very different thing from setting up a specialist server like the hardcore server. The game designers don't build quests specifically for the hardcore playstyle and they couldn't build quests specifically for your proposed softcore server. They would have to adopt your idea of balance across the whole game. Now I'm not saying your view of how the game should be balanced is necessarily wrong. I think that was how the game was balanced initially. The problem is that players want to be rewarded for playing the game and that inevitably leads to power creep and long term players finding normal content isn't challenging anymore. As a result more challenging content is added and that becomes the new normal. Even if the developers rebalanced the game the way you suggest (and recent changes like rebalancing magic items have actually done this), the game will quickly deviate from you ideal base line again. The hardcore server solves this problem wiping the servers after each season and making everyone start afresh next season, as well as through the permadeath mechanic. Neither of those seem like a solution to these problems on the main servers. There may be a way to create a "1st Life" or Casual server that limits power creep but it's unlikely the developers will ever balance new content specifically around it.

 

[calouscaine]

PaleFox, I think that the title of your thread has confused me and probably others. You aren't really proposing another server, softcore or otherwise. You are proposing that the whole game should be balanced around leveling from level 1 to cap by only doing quests once on normal difficulty. That's a very different thing from setting up a specialist server like the hardcore server. The game designers don't build quests specifically for the hardcore playstyle and they couldn't build quests specifically for your proposed softcore server. They would have to adopt your idea of balance across the whole game. Now I'm not saying your view of how the game should be balanced is necessarily wrong. I think that was how the game was balanced initially. The problem is that players want to be rewarded for playing the game and that inevitably leads to power creep and long term players finding normal content isn't challenging anymore. As a result more challenging content is added and that becomes the new normal. Even if the developers rebalanced the game the way you suggest (and recent changes like rebalancing magic items have actually done this), the game will quickly deviate from you ideal base line again. The hardcore server solves this problem wiping the servers after each season and making everyone start afresh next season, as well as through the permadeath mechanic. Neither of those seem like a solution to these problems on the main servers. There may be a way to create a "1st Life" or Casual server that limits power creep but it's unlikely the developers will ever balance new content specifically around it.

This is very true, if you played the game ten or more years ago, before prr (I still have a tank decked out in old thunder forge stuff), you'll find that the dungeon challenge was very different than now. If I took my old character through a new dungeon in the old gear he'd get creamed very fast.

 

[droid327]

I expect it to be challenging in a different way then hardcore as there will be level ranges where we fall short on xp and are forced to enter quests under level.

It'll be impossible for F2P players past a certain point, unless you just expect them to Daily Dice themselves to 20 or play 1 Challenge a day with their free token.

They would run out of enough "at level" quest XP by level 2. By the time you completed all L5 quests you'd still only be L3. By the time you completed all L10 quests, you'd only be L5. By the time you completed all F2P Heroic quests through L18 in Normal with no replay, you'd only have 227,422 XP, enough for L8.

Also, I dont even know how it can "make you" level up since you need to actually make choices to complete the level-up process.