+0 x0 Difficulty Settings

[EmmySky]

This came up in Help chat today, someone had previously been at +0 x0 and wanted to know how to return to that setting.

 

I confirmed this is the default setting when you have a character that has never altered their notoriety.

 

 

It is impossible to re-establish a setting of x0 as yourself x 0 would be equal to 0 enemies.

 

I don't know if this counts as a typo or a bug or what, but its confusing to new players and even to old players as there is effectively no difference between x0 and x1.  It should, by default, be listed as x1 because, again, it isn't x0 as that would spawn an empty mission.

 

Just wanted this noted down somewhere if someone wants to peek at it, its a super minor change and not even a QoL, just something that occassionally causes confusion.

Edited August 15, 2020 by EmmySky

[Vanden]

Hm, but the on-the-fly notoriety menu is a popmenu, which means it's just using slash commands to change the different difficulty settings. What happens if you type the command for team size out and pass it a 0? Would that set your difficulty to x0?

[AboveTheChemist]

8 hours ago, Vanden said:

What happens if you type the command for team size out and pass it a 0? Would that set your difficulty to x0?

I tested this last night and it does nothing. I even tried setting it to 0 and then zoning, in case there was a delay.

 

It did, however, set the team size to 1000 when I passed it a 1000, which I was not expecting. I was not brave enough to step into a mission with that setting, though.

[EmmySky]

35 minutes ago, AboveTheChemist said:

It did, however, set the team size to 1000 when I passed it a 1000, which I was not expecting. I was not brave enough to step into a mission with that setting, though.

You may have just discovered the answer to all those people who say the game is too easy.

[nihilii]

1 hour ago, AboveTheChemist said:

I tested this last night and it does nothing. I even tried setting it to 0 and then zoning, in case there was a delay.

 

It did, however, set the team size to 1000 when I passed it a 1000, which I was not expecting. I was not brave enough to step into a mission with that setting, though.

I did "setdifficultyteamsize -55555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555" just now. It overflows to a number in the hundreds of millions in the display text, but despite my hopes and dreams I wasn't met with a billion enemies once I entered the mission. Just regular x8.

However, interesting side effect (maybe?): on a level 41 character running +2, mobs inside the mission were level 44 and 45 (so, +3 and +4). First on a carnival newspaper mission, then on a council newspaper mission.

 

Edit: I switched to +4 x-55555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555, and enemies are now level 46 and level 47 (+5 and +6 relative to my level 41). So @EmmySky has it right - it is a way to increase difficulty, at least while you're under level 50.

Edited August 16, 2020 by nihilii

[EmmySky]

It would be cool to step into a mission with wall to wall enemies...no standing room just billions of the suckers full of XP ready to be liberated!

[Bill Z Bubba]

46 minutes ago, nihilii said:

at least while you're under level 50.

Bah

[Outrider_01]

44 minutes ago, nihilii said:

it is a way to increase difficulty, at least while you're under level 50.

Hmm, force exemp below 50 l ike maybe 48 and set higher for +6 baddies.  New way to farm.

[EmmySky]

Oh hell, I have opened a can of worms now lolol

[Bopper]

Looks like a new farm will come of this. Exemplar to level 45 and take on 55s. Fun times.

[aethereal]

How sure are we that this raises mob levels?  I've teamed with someone who had her team-size set to 256 for months, she said it was just the same as x8.

 

EDIT:  Hmmm, no I confirm +5 and +6 mobs with my team size set very high.

Edited August 16, 2020 by aethereal

[AboveTheChemist]

I did a little of my own testing (with screenshots if anyone wants to see them). I grabbed the 'They Call Me The Doctor' mission from Ouro. The mission level was 40, I was exemplared to 39. At setting 0x1, the highest level mob I could find (Agent Chalmers) was level 41. At 4x8 Agent Chalmers was level 45. At 4x1000 Agent Chalmers was level 46, and I couldn't find a team size setting that would push Agent Chalmers's level above 46. So it looks like this is a way to effectively set the difficulty level to +5. I tried with a level 50 mission as well but could not push mob level above 54.

[EmmySky]

I think 54 may be a hard cap of what enemies (outside of perhaps specially coded ones) will spawn.  If you set yourself x1000 and have exemplar or are naturally 48 I think that might represent the highest spread currently available.

[AboveTheChemist]

4 hours ago, EmmySky said:

I think 54 may be a hard cap of what enemies (outside of perhaps specially coded ones) will spawn.

Yep, that was my assumption as well, but I figured I would test and report just to be sure, especially since fighting level 55's came up earlier in the thread.

 

My apologies for the inadvertent thread derail, by the way. I just posted the thing about the x1000 setting as a humorous aside, and never expected it to morph into an actual thing.

[Vanden]

A long, long time ago, before the highly-customizable difficulty settings we had now were added, the size of the team affected the level of enemies. A large enough team would get an extra +1 to the enemies in addition to whatever your difficulty setting was. It's possible that when the current difficulty settings were added, that functionality wasn't removed, but rather tweaked so that it would never actually kick in on any team size settings players had access to. The on-the-fly method we have now is a SCoRE/Homecoming thing; when Paragon/Cryptic coded the team size setting command it wasn't intended as something players would be allowed to set to any arbitrary value they wanted.