Such a shame

[Caphriel]

You sound as if you blame this on the persons rather than on the game.

That's right. A game cannot please everyone. A game should not try to please everyone. While a good game can convert people into liking it, it cannot do so for all players, nor should it be expected to. Elements of a game cannot be considered to be bad design simply because they do not match the taste of a single player, several players, or even a great many players. You are erroneously equating good game design with popularity.

[Yogibear]

To all those people that think that you can't have challenges without a steep learning curve:

I think that having the strength of the enemy forces being dependent on your current gold (and maybe recall list) solves both issues. People who do good still have a sufficient challenge (maybe it's even a bigger challenge than without that mechanism ) and people who do not so good have a fair chance of finishing the campaign without having to go back.

That, from my point of view, would be a good game design: A solution that makes wesnoth a better experience for everyone. And the best is: It doesn't even need any gameplay/code changes, just a few WML adjustments to existing scenarios.

[Zachron]

So... dynamic difficulty level...

You know what is such a shame... The person who wrote this thread has put no additional input into it. Seriously, there should be some indication of actual involvement before being allowed to open new threads. I mean some really nice discussions have unfolded from a few of these one-post wonders...(and I'm wondering if some of these one post wonders have been disingenuous, posting these opinions only to agitate so as to create the desired discussion.)

[Icarusvogel]

To all those people that think that you can't have challenges without a steep learning curve:

I think that having the strength of the enemy forces being dependent on your current gold (and maybe recall list) solves both issues. People who do good still have a sufficient challenge (maybe it's even a bigger challenge than without that mechanism ) and people who do not so good have a fair chance of finishing the campaign without having to go back.

That, from my point of view, would be a good game design: A solution that makes wesnoth a better experience for everyone. And the best is: It doesn't even need any gameplay/code changes, just a few WML adjustments to existing scenarios.

Woudn't that take out a central aspect of the game: being careful with your gold and being wise with recruiting and recalling higher-level units regarding your income so as to come through the campaign fine?

[Gambit]

Well you could put a floor on it, but that won't eliminate the whiners.

[Zarel]

Dynamic difficulty is really the wrong way to go about it. Oblivion did it, and that was my least favorite part of it.

The problem isn't really that Wesnoth is hard, it's that the best strategy for playing campaigns is to spam expendable L1's, but it's hard for a beginning player to realize that, nor is it very fun for someone who prefers to use high level units.

[jaimeastorga2000]

You know what is such a shame... The person who wrote this thread has put no additional input into it. Seriously, there should be some indication of actual involvement before being allowed to open new threads. I mean some really nice discussions have unfolded from a few of these one-post wonders...

I disagree. Even if the person never posted again, some interesting post by other people came about in the thread.

[cretin]

At least its civil in this forum. I have seen too many break down into raging idiots yelling at each other in other forums.

[Caphriel]

It happens here, too. People break down into raging idiots. Once. Then they are heavy seen or heard from again, but Turuk coincidentally looks well-fed for a few days.

[ElvenKing]

Dynamic difficulty is really the wrong way to go about it. Oblivion did it, and that was my least favorite part of it.

I hated it as well. The problem with it is that it tends to result in the feeling that you are treading water somewhat. It significantly reduces the reward you get for becoming more powerful(which is rather annoying); although, it has to be said that it was implemented in a poor manner, to the point where it almost defeated the purpose of having it in the first place in some ways(if the intended purpose was to make the game stagnant difficulty wise). I mean you would be in serious trouble when your characters level was high if you hadn't trained your attributes very carefully. If you didn't know all the tricks you could well end up with a useless character the high levels.

Woudn't that take out a central aspect of the game: being careful with your gold and being wise with recruiting and recalling higher-level units regarding your income so as to come through the campaign fine?

That would probably depend on to what level it was implemented. You could design a level scaled system where managing your gold well still gives you some advantage.

[A-Red]

Dynamic difficulty is really the wrong way to go about it. Oblivion did it, and that was my least favorite part of it.

I hated it as well. The problem with it is that it tends to result in the feeling that you are treading water somewhat. It significantly reduces the reward you get for becoming more powerful(which is rather annoying); although, it has to be said that it was implemented in a poor manner, to the point where it almost defeated the purpose of having it in the first place in some ways(if the intended purpose was to make the game stagnant difficulty wise). I mean you would be in serious trouble when your characters level was high if you hadn't trained your attributes very carefully. If you didn't know all the tricks you could well end up with a useless character the high levels.

I third the negative sentiments toward Oblivion, but that's not really what was being suggested for Wesnoth. Oblivion scales the monsters up so they get harder as you get tougher; I think the suggestion Yogibear made was to do the reverse, to some extent, and give the player a break if they had low gold. The rewards for doing a good job would still be there, but there'd be less punishment for mistakes made ten levels ago.

[Zarel]

I third the negative sentiments toward Oblivion, but that's not really what was being suggested for Wesnoth. Oblivion scales the monsters up so they get harder as you get tougher; I think the suggestion Yogibear made was to do the reverse, to some extent, and give the player a break if they had low gold. The rewards for doing a good job would still be there, but there'd be less punishment for mistakes made ten levels ago.

Erm, that's the exact same thing. A double negative is still a positive, y'know. (Usually.)

I mean, making a game easier when someone's having a hard time is the exact same thing as making a game harder when someone's having an easy time. There's no difference. At all. It's the difference between "A game is harder in hard mode than in easy mode" and "A game is easier in easy mode than in hard mode".

[Rya]

If the system is well implemented I usually love it. If a bad players ends up with an easy campaign and a good player ends up with a challenging campaign automatically, then that's a good thing in my opinion.

Currently it's really bad, because bad players actually get punished while the good players get rewarded. That's totally counterproductive. It's like giving the worse player the handicap instead of the better one.

[ElvenKing]

If the system is well implemented I usually love it. If a bad players ends up with an easy campaign and a good player ends up with a challenging campaign automatically, then that's a good thing in my opinion.

Currently it's really bad, because bad players actually get punished while the good players get rewarded. That's totally counterproductive. It's like giving the worse player the handicap instead of the better one.

That is really dependent on the player I think. I for one would hate that kind of thing because I have an expectation that I should be forced to learn to play the game to do well at it. I want to be punished for playing badly. The currently proposed version of scaling I would hate because it would automatically scale to make it easier when I played badly, meaning that I would have no "tough" situation to analyse and develop a strategy for, so it could quite possibly slow down my learning of the game.

[Yogibear]

I was thinking of something like this:

Currently, a scenario normally scales the difficulty by giving the AI more or less gold (and maybe some additional recruits). So let's say, the scaling is like this:
easy = 100G, middle = 150G, hard = 200G

Let's make the rough assumption, that it takes the AI twice as much gold to give you a hard time (i know this is debatable, it's just for the examples purpose, the true number is not important).

So if a player has 200G and he plays on hard, i would give 400G to the AI. If he only has 50G, i'd give the AI 100G. So playing on hard will always be hard, where entering the scenario with 200G and current mechanics is more like a walk in the park (well, if you know what you are doing, that is).