Hmm I didn't think Captain difficulty was considered low/easy. I guess it might be for the naval aspect. I had a far easier time at sea respective of difficulty.
It does seem like MK might be conflating pacing with overall difficulty. I think the two should be separated, at least on the level that it effects progression relative to how much effort/time you've put in, which in the context of monetary gain and gear progression is an extremely shallow affair only made possible by the mods insistence to shower the player with end-game riches from the very beginning.
Essentially this equates to anyone not playing on max or near max difficulty to be effectively robbed of anything resembling a steady or consistent flow of progression. That's quite a glaring example of poor balancing in my book. But I'm not going to argue with the guy, he seems happy with it, which is totally fair. I don't really have an interest in it beyond pointing out possible balancing oversights for the betterment of the mod. People can always use addons to correct it.
Though I do still consider it an objectively bad design choice to enable players to max out gear and gold progression before the game has even started. That has always been an immensely unsatisfying and hollow experience for me. Perhaps there are no real solutions to that. I just thought surely there are better alternatives or a middle ground to be found somewhere.
I do find it odd that MK's reasoning and philosophy is not have balanced loot and consistent progression, but rather balance those inversely around difficulty. The expected and most logically sound method would be to have all elements reflect difficulty rating, but here you've scaled down loot balancing to an embarrassingly generous and shallow level to accommodate high difficulty. So it's difficult but not really. It's a likeness to doubling enemies but making them half as strong. I could understand if there was some virtue behind it, but I can't see any. It feels more like stripping weight from difficulty rating and at the same time making a parody out of character progression.
But I think if we're going to factor difficulty into it at all, someone should at least point out that due to how dungeon crawling works mechanically one can always farm with these absurd loot tables and profit massively before enemy scaling becomes an issue. I had noticed that on Captain difficulty, the first few dungeons, which ironically was all that was needed to amass grand riches, were extremely easy as scaling had not really caught up. You could conceivably also farm max difficulty dungeons with relative ease simply by resetting the scaling.
Admittedly, I've been largely uninvolved with anything seascape related, at least not beyond a few basic quests and merchant runs. I've been focusing almost exclusively on exploring the limits and dynamics of dungeon crawling as it relates to gear and gold progression and officer leveling. I have to say though, in light of what MK professes to, that even on Captain, dungeons get quite scary once scaling reaches its peak. Typically both my fighters and I will start getting one-shot about 10 cycles in. I do persist because I'm stubborn and like a challenge, but unfortunately it devolves more into a save-scum simulator at that point. Nothing a scaling reset doesn't fix though.
But I think therein lies the main problem. Dungeons, irrespective of difficulty, are immensely and disproportionately profitable BEFORE they scale beyond parity of the player. As mentioned earlier it only took 4 dungeon runs to amass millions of gold worth of loot on Captain for a relatively noobish player. I can confidently say that no level of difficulty is going to diminish or negate how disruptive that is to pacing/progression.
I do acknowledge the point made about difficulty, I just don't see how that serves to excuse the fact that by virtue of handing out end-game gold and loot to level 1 players on the first day, you've practically destroyed any semblance of pacing and progression. It means from very early on, the player has very little to look forward to or strive towards in terms of those aspects.
Prior to making these observations I was getting excited to start slow and steady making a name for myself as a trader, where the effort/reward ratio felt balanced and gratifying. But then 10 minutes later, after poking my head in the town dungeon, I had made more money than I would have doing trade runs for the next half-year. That for me was such an obnoxious disconnect that I felt an instant rush of disappointment and was even irritated by it. I didn't sell a single jewel before I was in the files tweaking the hell out of it.
