Always to the point and always correct as usual. However if you think that i play in pvp servers because i like to use explosives, you have far misunderstood me. The only reason i play pvp is because team gaming is giving a greater taste to this game. There are not a lot reasons to play pve team game and this is what would wish to find. However it just a simple wish and nothing more. I love the game as it is and i don’t care so much for changes. Except the internal buiding pieces, for theese I would build non stop for a week 
. I think that you get my point here my dear friend.
Fantastic idea, bravo, bravo, bravo. You nailed it. Thank you
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I don’t. I was simply trying to find a hypothetical example that involves PVP-only mechanic that would block non-PVP players from enjoying a dungeon. It was meant to illustrate how easy it is to say that certain people should not play a certain game mode, as long as that isn’t your preferred mode 
Don’t take it personally, either. I know your suggestion to Shadoza was made with good intentions 
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I don’t understand why that’s a problem. As long as those who play solo can beat the dungeon and it’s enjoyable, it doesn’t matter if you can also do it with a group.
Look at it this way: if you take 10 people and their thralls into the Dregs to kill the Abyssal Remnant, it’s definitely an overkill and it won’t be very enjoyable. And splitting the loot between 10 people won’t even be worth it.
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A better idea is to have the game do like ARK does with some bosses. I’m thinking of Ragnarok specifically. You see a message come up that says it is calculating the number in your party. In other words, when you all enter the area of the boss, it counts your party members, and adjusts the boss’ strength to match your party. I really think this is the best way to make a game challenging to solo, small party, and large party alike. Star Citizen was doing that with some Merc missions, and AFAIK, they intend to keep this mechanic. When you approached the target, it spawned 1 to 3 enemies for each person. YOU caused the spawn of these enemies. So, if it is just you, YOU cause 1 to 3 enemies to spawn. If a friend is along, he causes another 1 to 3. There should of course be a upper limit to that, for performance reasons. We stress tested this for them, because we are one of the largest Orgs. The game turned into a slide show due to too many enemies. It was crazy.
But the idea of increased difficulty based on party size is a viable option. To control exploiting, doors could be used to lock people out until the area is cleared. So, your party enters a room, and the door closes after a few seconds. Your party size is calculated, and enemies come into the area based on your party size. The more you bring, the more enemies spawn. If somebody didn’t make it in before the door closes, they are locked out until the area is cleared. Then the doors can be opened again.
The only issue is retreating. This would require some thought. Maybe, a member in the party can open the door to retreat, but doing so causes something to happen. Maybe a recalculation based on new players entering. In other words, the guy who wants to retreat may do so, but the enemies he spawn remain. Any new player that enters, causes new enemies to enter the area. This could be done in a variety of ways. They come in through a teleporter, or through doors that lead nowhere, like the game does now. Many ways you could bring new enemies into the area.
But the idea is simple…more party strength means more difficult dungeon. This would make a reason to replay the dungeon. You went through solo, or with a friend, and now your whole clan of ten is online? Why not try it again, to see what it is like with a lot of enemies spawning?
Whatever they do, I like the idea of different dungeons requiring different things. I like some requiring you to bring a fighter thrall. I like one requiring you to bring a dancer, because there is so much corruption. I like some requiring you to bring an archer. And I like the idea of some requiring you to go it alone…no thralls.
Requiring different potions, foods, buffs, etc., would also be good.
What must change is how all you have to do is take a high level fighter thrall, with good gear, and you can clear any dungeon.
To this, I wouldn’t mind a server-level toggle/dropdown for dungeon difficulty, with a maximum of 5 players being the toughest level. 3 could be the default for Officials (basically you + a max level Thrall + a foolish stoog…err…ah, I mean friend). That way SP’s could tune it down to 1 (current difficulty) and hardcore Admins could ramp it to 5.
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That’s actually not a bad idea. In ARK, there is a creature that you can get, but you can only get it for yourself. Unlike other creatures, this one must be linked to you. It’s on the Aberration ARK. You have to find a Reaper Queen, and beat her health down to less than 20% if I remember right. Then you let her grab you, and she implants a baby in you. Then you go on a killing spree to increase the baby’s imprinting, and then you have to get back to base, and into a room you created just for this. You also need Reaper pheromones. When the baby is born, you might die, as it bursts our of your chest, but you go back, and imprint it, and then feed it. When it is grown, it is your and yours only. You can’t give it to anybody else. It is yours only. They do not become claimable like other creatures, if abandoned.
Maybe Conan could have a King Arthur style weapon, where the weapon only serves the one who proves themselves worthy by making it through a dungeon, and being rewarded with that weapon. It shouldn’t be OP…just equal to the best weapons in the game. You can’t give it to thralls, or other players. It only allows you to wield it.
This dungeon is not a requirement for players to complete…just a challenge for those who want it. And, for those that accept that challenge, and are successful, there is a reward for doing so.
One cool thing about this weapon, and maybe some armor too, is that it could be something that no Alpha clan can take from you. If you get wiped, and didn’t have these items on you, maybe all you would need to do is construct the appropriate storage container, and the items magically appear in the chest after a very short period. The recipe for the chest could be learned at the end of the dungeon, when you earn the rewards.
This would bring a bit of balance to the game. Getting wiped wouldn’t set you back to square 1, and this would create a huge incentive to do that dungeon.
This gave me an idea.
Redesign dungeons so that they literally have a solo path AND a multiplayer path with identical drop tables. This way, soloists can get their loot, but parties can get multiple drops by killing the relatively easier solo path AND going through the tougher “party” path.
Zone in, go left = Single Player path.
Zone in, go right = Party time.
I know this will cost money, but hey…what doesn’t?
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This could not be optional, or the parties would just take the easy path to victory. An easier solution is the one I posted above. Just make the dungeons calculate party strength, and make the fight appropriate for the party. This way the same dungeon can be challenging for parties of any size, from solo, to 10 players.
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I don’t mean to be a party-pooper, but I have some bad news for people who keep suggesting that the boss damage should scale depending on how many players are doing the dungeon. I might be wrong, but I don’t think that’s possible to implement reliably with the tech Conan Exiles uses.
The team has already confirmed that they don’t have instance tech, without which they can’t have any reliable way of determining how many players are doing a dungeon.
That’s not to say that they couldn’t do a half-arsed attempt. For example, they could “lock” the entrance 30 seconds after a player has entered the dungeon and make it unavailable to other players until there are no players left inside. This would, of course, be abused horribly 
Or they could dynamically adjust the damage output of a boss based on a number of players inside a certain radius of it. Make the radius too small, and it’s EZ Cheese – just have someone with a bow outside that radius. Make the radius too big, and suddenly you’ll all get slaughtered just because another group of players came close enough.
And all of that’s on top of the fact that making the damage output scalable is probably a lot of work. That’s not to say it wouldn’t be worth it, but I would rather see that happen after they’ve gotten rid of big bugs and exploits.
I agree that this is the best possible solution. Additional drops scaling on party size would be nice if its technically feasible.
After tanking for 15+ years in WoW I enjoy a great fight with movement mechanics, deathzones, and necessary pauses for pacing. If I could get this experience in a Conan dungeon, I’d take it.
However, I’d like to add that it should be a customizable server setting: Auto Scale Dungeon Difficulty: Y/N and if N - Default Dungeon Difficulty [1-10] where 1 = Current difficulty.
The max doesn’t need to be 10, just whatever the maximum party size they envisioned going into dungeons in the first place.
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This is what I was afraid of, hence my suggestion that just required a redesign of existing assets (which I agree is a poor alternative) rather than coding in scalability.
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TBF, I just want boss mechanic changes rather than damage input/output changes. I tanked and spanked in WoW trash for way too long. I wanna move around and fight! A dance to the death! And yes, I want to yell “Stop standing in the gdn fire!”
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Sure they could. The server simply detects YOU enter the dungeon, along with your partner. It says, OK, 1+1=2. So in each area, it adds an extra skeleton. And maybe adds an additional 2K to the health of bosses. How hard is that?
Those Skeletons could even be inside, already spawned, but behind closed doors. Only the correct amount of doors open based on the number of players that enter. In other words, maybe the area has 8 skeletons. This is all that would be there for one player that comes through. If a second player is detected, a door opens and 4 more skeletons emerge into the area. Or, they just emerge from the ground. Many ways to add them to the area.
As to the health of the boss, how hard is it for the boss’ health to be calculated based on the number of players in the area?
So, programming is weird. Whenever someone asks “how hard can that be”, this is what pops up in my brain:
Humor aside, I’ll try to explain.
You’re thinking about what we call “the happy path”. What you described is simple, as long as that’s the only thing you think about.
Let’s assume you’re talking about a dungeon like the Warmaker’s Sanctuary or the Dregs, and not about a place like Bin-Yakin’s Seal. The reason for this assumption is that having a loading screen transition makes it easier – without that, the logic you propose would be even harder to implement.
So, let’s say we’re talking about a rule that says “if a player has been teleported into the dungeon, spawn an additional skeleton and beef up the main boss’s health by 2k”.
The first difficulty is “beef up the main boss’s health by 2k”. In modern video games, actors are typically spawned from some kind of a blueprint. There’s probably an invisible object placed in a certain location that spawns the actual actor and keeps track of it. If the actor has been dead for a certain amount of time, the spawner will spawn another one from the blueprint. So how do we beef up the boss?
We could have multiple blueprints, depending on the number of players, and use the blueprint that corresponds to the number of players that have entered the dungeon to spawn the correct boss. Ah, but what happens if the boss is already spawned? Does that mean that we have to delay the boss spawn until the players come close enough? What happens if another player enters when the boss has already spawned? Okay, so that won’t work. Let’s try something else.
The spawner already keeps track of the boss it spawned, so maybe it could modify the already spawned boss when another player enters the dungeon? Something like “when another player enters the dungeon, increase the boss’s max health and current health by 2k”. That would work better. It would still look ugly if you’re fighting the boss and looking at its health bar, and then another player enters the dungeon and suddenly the health bar fills up partially, but at least it would work, right? Sort of, but…
What happens if one of the players leaves the dungeon? Does the boss’s health drop back down? That’s an interesting loophole right there: if there’s two of us, we can manage the aggro and dish out more damage, get the boss’s health down to 2k, then one of us hightails it out of the dungeon and the boss just dies! EZ Cheesy
Oh, and what about those skeletons we released? Do they die of inexplicable causes? Do they stay where they are? What if all players leave the dungeon? If we have the 10 extra skeletons because there were that many players in the dungeon, will they stay there and wait for the unlucky sod who enters the dungeon to solo it?
And all of these were just questions of a conceptual nature, without digging into the warts of the particular tech used for Conan Exiles. Each engine has weird, almost arcane limitations that can hobble the development in unexpected ways.
Basically, the answer to “how hard can it be to add the feature I like to a game” is very often: have you ever legalized marijuana?
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I haven’t played TESO, but from what I can see online, it looks like its dungeons are instances. Unless the meaning of that term has changed over the last 2-3 years, what it means is that each time a group of players enters a dungeon, it’s like a separate copy of that dungeon. That allows the game to “spawn a new instance” of the dungeon and customize it to the group that entered it.
As I mentioned in an earlier post – thanks to @Multigun who brought it up elsewhere – Funcom has confirmed that the tech they use doesn’t support instances. There’s only one Warmaker’s Sanctuary per server and all players share it.
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If I understand the map correctly, isn’t it always present underneath the NE corner of the map, where the “blurry soup” is?
Still not hard. How do I know this? It’s been done…in more than one game. Would it require a loading screen? No. Would it require some rethinking of dungeons? Probably a certainty. Is this likely to happen? I doubt it. Could it happen for the new map? I hope so, or I doubt I will play.
Loading screen? Not needed. A door is enough. You enter a room, through a door, and the door closes behind you. This is where the calculation takes place. Then the door in front of you opens, and you fight the boss. This does present some issues. First, unlike some of the dungeons now, you would not be able to retreat out of the dungeon the way you came, but they could make it such that there are exits for you to leave through, but not return through. Same exits you would use once the boss is killed. Next issue is that if you die, and there is nobody there to rescue your stuff, you would likely lose it. I am not actually opposed to that. Failure should have consequences, and like it or not, having friends is always better than not.
This method would likely need to be used for all areas of the dungeon that they wanted to scale difficulty for. You open a door, and enter a room. Door closes behind you and the calculation is made. Nobody gets in until you are dead, or win the battle. A timer could be set on this also, to prevent griefing. You only have so long to clear that area, or you fail, and the boss in the next area won’t be available. You are then teleported out of that area…or even better, the exit doors open, and many enemies come in, and chase you out. You better run, or you are dead. Try harder next time.
The timer does not have to be so short that people have a really hard time defeating it.
In ARK Ragnarok, when you enter the Ice Queen’s cave, there is a message that pops up. Queen is present…or Queen is not present. There is a cool down after somebody defeats her…maybe an hour at most. If that is good for a map that allows more than 40 people, that should be good in Conan.
Look, I do not think it would not take some time and effort, but it is not impossible to make this better. What he have is not good. It’s boring. Essentially every boss and every dungeon can be approached the same way. And it’s easy. Too easy.
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Us Canadians did, it was dang hard and took way to long lol.
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