[Argentil]

So, Ive been playing a lot of the game and am facing higher and higher difficulties in matchmaking. I'm now getting 44% difficulty according to our scoring screen at this point, and enemies are becoming incredibly accurate, meaty and damaging. It's gotten to the point where an antagonist in our match makes games take 40 minutes. What is going on with the difficulty, and why are we receiving a quarter of the rewards we were receiving 2 days ago? No matter how well we score it feels like we're just wasting time with such long, difficult matches and low rewards(we get 2k on Prologue with a score of 8 and an antagonist).

No matter what I do, how well or badly the game goes, our rewards are a quarter of what they were 2 days ago.

[Argentil]

OK, so an update: After winning a match (after my above post), the subsequent match went up to 46% difficulty and took 29 minutes without an antagonist. The system seems to be bumping up the difficulty by 2% every time.

Edit: Yup, next game was 48%, which was a loss. Pretty tough to beat, you get downed by one shot from a shotgun enemy, and enemies are everywhere.

[Chiki40]

Your ELO keeps increasing as long as you win matches, and drops if you lose. Match difficulty depends on every player ELO

[Argentil]

Ok, what is ELO? Where is there more info on this system? Should it be reducing our rewards to below the 1000's in many cases even with a victory? It seems very broken.

[Kid Dracula]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system - Basically as you get better, the game adjusts difficulty dependent on your in-game ELO rating.

[Level9Drow]

I have to support the OP, the difficulty gets outrageous. You would think the rewards would improve.
You say that the difficulty goes up as your ELO rating goes up, but does this also mean that the difficulty goes back down when your ELO rating goes down? I could see games getting so difficult players would be inclined to throw games to get it back down to a fun level again.

You should really consider either making the enemies less difficult, and if not please improve the reward and add an option to CHOOSE your multi-player difficulty.

I'm really having no fun lately, no fun at all. And if this is what you want, then that's sad. I am getting to the point where I logg in and stare and sigh because I don't feel like the headache. The fact that this was a multi-player Co-OP was really good, I got tired of PvP all the time on Overwatch and wanted a more raid like feel. The Antag system was bad enough that I had to put up with, and worse, participate in in order to get to use weapons you "win", but the difficulty raising makes it so that I can't look forward too relaxing and having fun doing PvE.

Please consider looking into this.

[Black_Adder_]

As far as I've noticed the servers usually try to match you up with people of the same mastery level, so increased difficulty is not that much of problem if all 4 know what they are doing. Also the higher your mastery the easier it is to do missions against antagonist because the servers automatically tune down the AI mobs. At least in my experience at high mastery it is sometimes an easy mode when you have to fight antragonist because AI are weak, slow and their numbers are down.

I have done a mission on 9 with difficulty level 66% that felt like a walk in a park because everyone knew what they were doing and yet I still have failed missions with difficulty level of 22% because 2 or 3 guys in team were tools.

[OutlawSiamang21]

Black you are so right lol. I feel like. trash when that happens. 66% props to you highest I've completed is 61 and I'll admit I was a weak link that played my hardest to not embarrass the team. We had fun though lol. The difficulty is absolutely nice though when varying from antag to without cause seriously who would play a match if the ai scaled exactly to 66 without antag but you go against an antag like moth, bird, jojoe, or dagg. Wouldn't even be funny lol. Keep up the work Mercury love the game.

[Level9Drow]

As far as I've noticed the servers usually try to match you up with people of the same mastery level, so increased difficulty is not that much of problem if all 4 know what they are doing. Also the higher your mastery the easier it is to do missions against antagonist because the servers automatically tune down the AI mobs. At least in my experience at high mastery it is sometimes an easy mode when you have to fight antragonist because AI are weak, slow and their numbers are down.

I have done a mission on 9 with difficulty level 66% that felt like a walk in a park because everyone knew what they were doing and yet I still have failed missions with difficulty level of 22% because 2 or 3 guys in team were tools.

Well apparently this is not the case, because I get stomped by AI. Either the match making is reading me wrong and placing me with way better players, the game is too hard at my ELO or something... I perfectly fine saying I suck, but that's what ELO and Match Making are there for, if they're working correctly I shouldn't be getting 1 and 2 shotted by minions and steggered to the point of not even being able to fire back. I mean, if this is happening then one would have to ask, why is a player like me there in the first place? It should work itelf out, but evidently it's not.

EDIT: I may also be one of those tools that were in your group, theoretically. And that's fine if I may be that poor at the game, but we can all wonder why would a player like me be in your group in the first place? Clearly you are a more skilled player and having lower skilled players in your group is an undue burden to you, but it's also a burden for lower skilled players, as they don't want to fight against AI matched to your ELO.

[LordDraco3]

I'd also like to chime in that the difficulty score has little to no effect on the rewards given, making the increasing grind REALLY unpleasant...

Last night for example, I was on a decent team in the Lyre Sphere mission. Even with a Loaht though, there were constantly enemies swarming EVERYWHERE 100% of the time. We barely scraped through at 20 minutes of mission time, with 59% difficulty and like 30 deaths. 6k gold reward to be split up was all we got for the trouble, 0 blueprints out of 4 possible...and that mission gives more gold than any other. Should have just gave up part ways in due to the rewards vs. time spent, and I know that has been suggested TONS of times by several players.

I don't mind difficulty going up, but causing longer missions and reward levels hardly going up means less reward for time spent, making the game that much less fun since rewards are currently already stupidly low. My only consolation was that I used 1 ticket on that game so at least I got 5k out of it, but I could have got that 5k by giving up the mission 60 seconds in, instead of taking 20 minutes to win

[BeertheBrad]

Another item to add to this.. Was playing with a good group and were consistently getting 8's with decent rewards. A level 17 antagonist was thrown into our game, difficulty felt the same, we worked together and controlled the antag, but the end result was longer times from the antag distraction and an antag score of 27?!?!? How is a level 17 considered only worth 27%?

Note you don't get a difficulty of the mission rating with an antag. So our scores were dropping to low 7s. I think they should also calculate the difficulty rating as well.

[Level9Drow]

I wish they allowed an upvote option. I would upvote this post.

[Quanrian]

Just because they are level 17 doesn't mean they are amazing. They could have been very lucky and just killed a lot of newbies to get that high. They could have in fact been higher at one point but kept losing so they weren't actually worth much to play against. To clarify, the difference between LVL15 Antagonist and a LVL17 is only 8 Stigmas. That difference could be done in two matches. Were it me, I show anywhere from 10 to 15 depending on how commited I am that week and I admit a good chunk of it relies on luck but on a good streak I can hit 15 in as little as four matches.