ruler wrote:Many people complain that the game is too difficult, and someone that gets frustrated with a game isn't likely to recommend it, let alone continue playing it or purchase additional content. Easy mode -> larger playerbase -> more money -> more development resources -> more content and stuff other players will benefit from. I care because I find it silly that people reject the idea of adding an easy mode.
Keep in mind that any game maker can always designed and made their game to be easy/easier or add some sort of god mode into the game, which is very trivial to implement— but in this game, like many other great game, chose not to do this— I won't going to pretend that I knew what exactly is the reason, but there is a reason behind it.
Therefore, rather than asking for the game to fits you, it's seem easier to just looking for mods, trainer, or cheating to make the game fits you IMO.
ruler wrote:As for implementation:
Each encounter will be classified by its difficulty, range from say -3 to 3.
New encounters won't be completely random; rather it will give preference based on the current trend. With -3 being the easiest, if you encounter 3 easiest encounters in a row,this will add up to -9, and the system will have a better chance of rolling a more difficult encounter. That is, before each encounter, the system first looks at the current average difficulty, and adjusts the chance accordingly.
Outliers in difficulty will be omitted, like one of those insanely difficult ships that are tougher than the boss.
You're missing the whole point of randomness and seem to underestimated the level of influences players can exert on the game's random nature— on the grand scheme of thing, the game is much less random than many (mostly new player) believe.
ruler wrote:Crew members could have additional health to make boardings easier to defend. Before you learn that you just need to open up all the airlocks, 4-mantis boards are extremely deadly.
But why would people want to learn to use the airlock (and other tactics+countermeasure) if boarders, or any other threats, are easy to deal with in the first place?
Mistake needed to be made for people to actually learn something, and the threats needed to be real to some extent in order to gives value to the countermeasure of the threats and 'a mistake' some significant that give player an incentive to actually learn to minimize it.
In fact, I believe that the ship any new player must use, the Kestrel A, is designed specifically not only to be very straight-forward and simple to play, but also actually teach new player that, apart from getting destroyed by enemy's shots, there's other way you can die in this game if you're not careful.
ruler wrote:Starting scrap bonus and/or scrap bonus could be increased.
IMO the game already gave you as much scraps as it can be on easy mode without eliminating the occasional need to make some tough decision (which is what made the game fun) on what to spent it on altogether.