[Dynamics] Players 'buffing' enemies.

[Ood]

[deadhorsebeating]
The game is boring.
[/deadhorsebeating]

Yes, here's some more salt.

Idea 6 for removing boring:

Let's face it, when 4 or more players get together, tank positioning, 'skill', dodging, etc. have no meaning. Enemies die so fast that tactics do not matter. One way of remedying that would be to buff enemies when more than a certain number of players are nearby.
Even better, get rid of lone wolf bonus, and make the 'buff' progressive. When no other players are near you, the enemies are maybe a little easier than they are now when you are killing solo (without lone wolf), when you are with 1 person, they are current difficulty, trio buffed a little bit, 4 more, 5 more, etc. Probably still have a threshold value for buffs, maybe stop increasing when >~8 players are near one another.

(yep that's it, unless you want the more explanation below)

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Buffing enemies when lots of people are around would have lots of different effects:

• Easier solo scouting (hurray something positive for tbs)
• Increased convoy difficulty in small lanes, and greater encouragement to clear lanes.
• More difficult 'difficult' areas, dungeons, mazes, etc. (the few areas that are starting to require multiple players).
• Bosses/minibosses/convoys could (or could not) be exempt (obviously rebalance needed if not exempt)
• Not be too much of a buff so more players is no longer merrier, but make things not mind-numbingly easy
• I'm sure there's others

[Justin]

When I first read this I thought: "Wow, this would actually cure my wall-farming hatred a bit".

Then I remembered: "A major theme of this game is to discourage solo-play".

Although that theme makes a friendless fool like me struggle to play this game, it is accomplished right now. Solo play would be encouraged with this buff because the difficulty increases as players join you. If the player who joins you sucks, it makes the game that much more difficult for you. People could teleport to you specifically to make the game harder for you. So that leads to the theme "noobs can never negatively affect the gameplay of others. They can only have a positive impact or no effect at all" becoming untrue.

Maybe the base-difficulty could stay the same until 'x' players are near, and then it increases per player after that point? I don't know what 'x' would be though, and how high the limit would be.

Even if 1 person and 2 people have the same difficulty, and the difficulty increases thereafter, it would be beneficial to have another person play with you. The only way to make the others more beneficial is to have better loot drop with a larger group aswell. Can't think of any negatives to that right now, but there probably are some.

Oh, but then there's people using bots to teleport to you and give you the maximum difficulty w/o the bots participating in the fight. (Would only be a problem now though because of the lack of players.)