how to: difficulty settings

here is the problem as i see it:

-there is a wide skill difference between players and thus the need for a system to adjust game difficulty to the players skill / wishes.

-there are a lot of different expectations from players regarding difficulty: mostly casuals that wanna avoid to heavy challanges while others cant have it challanging enough

-there is a lot of power creep going on reducing previously challenging missions to jokingly easy wcb fireworks

-there are loads of ppl hating on their teammates for doing to little dmg in stfs

-there are no really challenging missions left

-i as the player have little to no influce on how challanging the game is for we when it comes to late game


The strange thing about all this is that this game already has a nice system in place for difficulty settings for all the normal missions you play when lvling, but once you reach endgame its all reduced to the queues where some missions have an elite version.

What I want now is just to basically copy over all that flexibility from the SP missions to the pve endgame content. I dont want another "nightmare" lvl stfs or whatever, i want the following:

- a difficulty slider from say 1-100 for PvE content
- a "range" to be set up by players affecting the group building when queueing that specifies how far i am willing to vary from my set difficulty value when pugging
- a similar slider for when creating own instances of those missions
- a button that enables "range-increasing" meaning something like "when i queue and there are no groups forming in my difficulty range my range will increase every 15 seconds i wait over 3 minutes by say 5 until a group is formed
- when i am grouped with other ppl on different difficulty settings the "effective" difficulty of the mission will just be the arithmetic mean value of those playing so if we have two players with 30 and two with 50 and one with 40 the resulting mission will play at 40 cause thats the mean value and i only queue in this pug when this setting is within my "range".

So when i pug i queue up for say ISE and there is no more normal/elite/whatever just one ISE queue. I will be grouped with other players in my range, whatever that is, and thats that.

Concering difficulty and enemy power i would hope they make it an exponential scale like power scales by 2^(difficulty setting /20) or something like that. Just make it REALLY hard when crossing the say 20-40 range.

Like

1 : normal as it is now
20 : elite as it is now
...
100 : crazy crazy

And while your at it, i dont what just increasing HP/dmg values. I want the range and frequency of powers used by enemys to increase with scaling difficulty and i want that enemy specific and more special weapons/things to do with increasing difficulty:

-tac cubes could get loads of hull/shield-reg
-and maybe some added short range high dmg output cannons with say 5km max range
-voth could get even more powers or use the ones they have more frequently, they stay active longer
- ...
- or even some specials like a tac cube has insane lvls of regen but there are hard points we have to destroy to reduce this to manageable values bascally reflecting the fleet targeting the cubes shield regenerators or something along those lines. In short creating a set of special objectives that are tied to an enemy basically reducing his power (determined by the missions difficulty) to lower levels when we complete them.

You could also apply the same technique when putting ppl in instances of say dyson battlefield thus including basically every part of the game where there is combat except ofc pvp.

With the range modifier and stuff you could ensure that noone would be grouped above his comfort zone. You would not need to make normal / elite / whatever versions of missions. Every one could set the game up as he or she likes, ofc with increasing rewards as the difficulty increases. No need for continued rework of old missions to cope with powercreep as long as the first implementation of the slider is crazy enough.


I think they should be able to do something like this idea quite easily with their system cause they already have something like this working when playing normal story mission content on different lvls and different difficulty settings. I just would like to see it brought over to the pve queues and while doing so added a lot of room over the current elite difficulty. The stuff about adding special ways to destroy say cubes on higher lvls is obviously just optional but i assume i could be a lot of fun.

TL;DR:
i want something like the D3-Monsterclass stuff for sto