How does the dynamic difficulty rating work exactly?
So I observed live the rating of one my outpost:
yesterday: started brutal, and after a full cycle of activation outpost became dangerous
today:
started dangerous, became brutal after the FIRST raid (person died 8 times)
After another raid with no death it became dangerous again!
-So it seems that difficulty is recalculated every single raid!
Which rises numerous questions:
-To which expeditions my outpost is presented? Is it simultaneuously in brutal and dangerous queues?
-How many raids should I expect during a cycle of activation? before brutal always got a low number of raids, dangerous a medium number and normal a high number
-How is this not RNG? if someone strong shows up my rating instantly decrease, if a beginner shows up my rating instantly goes up. Shouldn't be better to wait a full activation cycle to recalculate difficulty?
-If outposts don't get the same numbers of raids it is also difficult to reclaculate fairly
Comments
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I would like to know the answer to the questions you are asking too. They are kind of tight lipped about the specifics regarding dynamic difficulty. Which I can understand to a degree. You don't want players trying to abuse the system more than they already do. Some things we can figure out through the powers of observation though. As you've figured out, each raid does impact an outposts rating.
You bring up one of the issues I have with dynamic difficulty. There aren't many players that choose to go through brutal difficulty maps but the ones that do attempt brutal maps tend to be highly confident and skilled players. They tend to be used to all the crazy stuff builders throw at them and can generally handle it with few deaths. But make no mistake, those outposts still deserve to be brutal even if they aren't getting a lot of kills. As you've observed, as soon as they drop to dangerous it turns into a meat grinder.
Imho, if an outpost hits a certain threshold of threats it should be permanently brutal. I say permanent, but I really only mean if so long as that threshold is met. I think certain exceptions should be made. For example, I think only the first 5 impalers should count toward an outposts difficulty rating. Generally tons of impalers aren't very effective and usually implies an XP or farm outpost.
"-To which expeditions my outpost is presented? Is it simultaneously in brutal and dangerous queues?"
I think I can sort of answer this question. And the answer is weird. Yes, it is possible for a single outpost to be in both queues. When you activate an outpost, the outpost is most likely to show up on people's expeditions for the first two hours of it's life cycle. Once an outpost shows up on someone's expedition, it will stay there until the player raids it. Maybe it shows up right as that player takes a break from the game. They come back two weeks later and play your outpost. The version they play is "locked in" according to when it was put into their expedition. For example, let's say the version the player has in their expedition 2 weeks ago is prestige 1 and early in the outposts design. After two weeks, you've prestiged it up to 10 and made massive changes. That player still raids the prestige 1 version. How does that particular raid impact your dynamic difficulty? I don't really know. It's not the same map for all intents and purposes.
"-How many raids should I expect during a cycle of activation? before brutal always got a low number of raids, dangerous a medium number and normal a high number"
I could have answered this with a fairly high degree of confidence a week ago. The change to the way difficulty is calculated recently really changed things. Last week you could expect to see with a large amount of consistency, Normal 20-30 raids, dangerous 7-9, brutal 2-4. Since the change it seems like normal 8-11, dangerous 5-6, brutal 2. From my experience the total number of raids across the board has gone down. I don't know how that works honestly. If normal has a huge drop in number of raids then you'd think those raids would be going somewhere else. I think the number of outposts that qualify for normal and dangerous has increased drastically. More outposts means less raids per outpost. But if that was the case then you'd expect to see more raids in brutals which I'm not seeing. Things are weird currently. I'd give it more time to settle down and see how things work in a week.
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