With the Hammerhead coming in alpha 3.3, how do you plan to adapt the available missions to scale properly?
TL;DRMissions won't scale their enemies to the player's ship; instead a full range of difficulties with matching rewards will be offered, with balancing kept only for interdictions, which aren't the player's choice.
Okay. So, balance scaling, difficulty scaling, like, I accept this mission and I turn up in a Hammerhead and suddenly we've decided to spawn you bigger enemies, more enemies, whatever. That's not something we will be doing. What instead we'll be doing is just offering more difficult missions that people with lesser ships, or fewer people in their ships, smaller groups, would just not be able to compete in and complete. So that's the way we won't be balancing missions. We will be providing the full array of difficulties, so that if we build a mission for a Hammerhead, a fully loaded Hammerhead, but a group of five people in Hornets who are exceptional pilots want to try that, they can succeed and get double the reward. Double the risk, but double the reward should they complete it. We did used to have, back in the 2.0 days, we used to balance missions, and that was really frustrating actually for players because it just meant that they always felt the exact same amount of challenge. Even if they rolled up with all their friends, it wasn't a cakewalk. It was the same over and over again. And if you were outgunned in the way we balanced it, you would always be outgunned, no matter who you took. So yeah, we've gone away from it. I will say, though, the one place we will balance difficulty is the interdictions, because they are not your choice. You choose to take a very difficult mission and you die, then so be it. You took that mission. Interdiction, if you are in an Aurora and we spawn in a Hammerhead, we've done something wrong there.
I remember those days where it balanced based on the number of people you took into an area. So not only could you never gain any kind of advantage, but if you showed up in a multi-crew ship, if you showed up four people in a Connie instead of four people in Hornets, you were pretty much at a severe disadvantage, an even worse disadvantage then.
Those were the flow graph days. Those were the days before Subsumption, where we had to do things very, very simply. The other problem was you'd get out of your ship and be halfway EVA-ing, and then someone else would turn up and the things would spawn in and blow up your ship, and, you know, absolute nightmare.