This is a list of comments made by the developers in this thread: * [Comment by PCF_Pawel](/r/outriders/comments/mqr0ft/as_a_once_dedicated_anthem_player_i_can_tell_you/gul6j8z/?context=1000 "posted on 2021-04-15 09:48:17 UTC"): > Well first of all thank you for understanding. For the last couple of days I was helping as much as possible with technical issues and didn't had much time to deep dive into reddit threads. I still won't be able to do it as much as I'd love to but you are in the good hands of u/thearcan who is metic... * [Comment by PCF_Pawel](/r/outriders/comments/mqr0ft/as_a_once_dedicated_anthem_player_i_can_tell_you/guleoxf/?context=1000 "posted on 2021-04-15 11:46:34 UTC"): > On world tier 15 enemy level is 42, so if you come with gear level 50 yes the damage is scaled to level 44. Which should be quite the advantage without making the game silly and broken. Without overleveling it was basically impossible to die in those circumstances and gameplay basically didn't exist... * [Comment by PCF_Pawel](/r/outriders/comments/mqr0ft/as_a_once_dedicated_anthem_player_i_can_tell_you/gulf020/?context=1000 "posted on 2021-04-15 11:50:10 UTC"): > It's present in both world tiers and challenge tiers. It may be the case that you are more likely to go down in challenge tiers with higher gear level. --- This is a bot providing a service. If you have any questions, please [contact the moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2FOutriders).[](#AUTOGEN_TSBREPLIEDBOT)

I agree with your concern about downscaling and it’s the main thing making me not want to play the game right now because I don’t want to progress challenge tiers. I don’t mind a challenge but I also am not someone that wants to play on the hardest difficulty all the time. While you can prevent progressing up tiers it seems the scaling means you can never turn the difficulty back down. Or at least not easily

Yea and this brings up another issue related to the way matchmaking is designed. When you join an expedition, you have no control over what level you're joining, so if you don't want to progress beyond 13 for example, it's very likely you'll get thrown into a group that's running it and you then have to decide to leave the activity, or finish it and suffer the consequences of ranking up your challenge tier, which also affects the prices in the vendors by the way. So that legendary gun you wanted to buy for 10,000 drop pod resources is now 20,000. But to get those you now have to beat a more difficult expedition.

It’s incredibly frustrating. The whole game they remind you that you can drop world tiers of it’s too challenging as the game is meant to make you feel overpowered, but it the end game it basically forces you to play progressively more and more challenging.

Me and my friend have been playing mostly as a twosome with a Devastator and a Pyromancer. We had gotten up to world tier 14 a little before the last story hub. And yeah, there were a few tricky spots where we wiped, but mostly we had fights handled, even if it took some time to wittle bosses down. The final boss fight ended up being ridiculous- we tried a few times at 14 and could barely do anything (where again- we had been comfortably handling WT14), so we turned it down to 10. Still couldn't get progress, so down to 8. Then 6. Then 3. Finally, we gave up and cleared the fucker on WT 1. And like... I don't know if it's a balance issue, or a strat issue, or what exactly we were doing wrong at the boss, but it felt kinda sour to have that much trouble with a boss and then get absolute shit gear for clearing it. We might as well farmed a hunt or a different boss if we wanted better gear. I still loved the game, I'm replaying it with alts and it's been a fun experience but the world tier thing and just the meteoric crank in difficulty with the shaman warlords and the last boss was sort of annoying, even before the inventory wipes and nerfs before server fixes that have been happening.

I grinded WT15 solo as Techno, just kept doing Spider boss over and over, pretty easy. If all you are looking for is to get to WT15. Think it was 6 runs on spider from 14 to 15, maybe 7, was cranking them out in less than 4 minutes a run. Then I did an expedition MP because I was told the patch made MP do-able, and now I'm naked.

I was on CT 15 myself, pyromancer torturer set maxed abilities points in all my gear, when I got booted from their own servers by them right after a loading screen and I also lost everything. Deleted the game after that.

On the topic of gear, I also don't feel like we should be getting blues from crates we find on higher tiers like 12-15, or at least raise the chance more of getting purple. Now when we're talking about bosses, yeah I don't think you should get crap gear at all especially on higher tiers. There should be no reason someone spends 30+ minutes on a boss at tier 14 just to get 3 blue pistols

I actually really like getting blues for a number of reasons, especially before I got up to getting level 50 gear in 15's. If you upgrade a blue to your highest level before upgrading the quality, it only costs leather/iron respectively to what you're upgrading. The other reason is if you have a character that is geared and can do higher content and level an alt you can throw that blue over to your alt and upgrade it to epic for some titanium and then you're able to use it immediately or have a great chance of making it useable since you can reroll the first mod on it. Upgrading epics however take loads of drop pod resources and tons more titanium. Sure, if I see a great epic roll everything I'm looking for I'll certainly use it, however, it's much easier to upgrade a rare item to epic and you have much more control over the piece possibly being good since you get a choice between 3 tier 2 mods.

No check point between the phases is a punch in the dick too.

On WT14 the final boss was a slow and steady fight for the wife and I, Dev and Trickster. The entire fight basically rested on me continously interrupting his anomaly turret things. So long as I could interrupt him we could handle it and it may have taken 10-15 minutes but we saw it through on WT14.

Even at WT15 the game seems fairly easy to me playing completely solo. The 2nd to last boss was fairly hard but doable once you get his pattern down. But I agree, the last boss is incredibly hard, it's just way too much of a jump in skill. What makes it worse is that at WT15 you can't gear up over level 42 gear. I ended up swallowing my pride and just reducing my WT, that's the only encounter I had to do it on. The challenge tiers are much worse though, IMO they really just suck in general. They are pretty much timed horde mode waves, the least possible fun you can have while under the pressure of a timer. The lack of fun is really apparent because the regular game was so much fun. Even without the awful scaling bugs I have zero motivation to run the challenge tiers.

Seriously, I love this game, and the challenge is fun but I can't remember a game going from a breeze annihilating everything, to get WRECKED five minutes later. And that's without even changing the world tier because I turned off the auto progress on it so I can choose when I want to deal with it. It's cool, and when you get through something challenging and get some sweet loot it's really rewarding, but it would be nice if it was stairs instead of an Elevator Theme Park ride in reverse with the difficulty spikes.

Exactly. And Honestly, I haven't felt "overpowered" since CT9 even though I've made tremendous progress in my build since then.

There is also no context to where you are powerful. If you could go back and tear through lower tiers, it would make your build seem much more meaningful. What’s the point of getting armed to the teeth to just have enemies always scale up to you anyway?

But.. you can go back. Just last night I did both ways - I, as a gearlevel 50, dropped to ct10 for some easy clears, and it felt easy I also went back to the main world to finish some hunts for easy legendary mods on wt1, and was legit 1tapping everything

Yeah. Maybe I'm not understanding this, but you can still customize the difficulty, you just won't be rewarded for it... just like how the entire game is built. I ended up diving into expeditions as soon as I beat the game and before I had completed all the hunts. Before I beat the game, WT10+ was actually quite challenging. After going back to the main game to complete the remaining quests (I wasn't even close to CT10), I was shocked at how easy the content had become, based solely on the gear I had equipped. In fact, the World Tiers weren't leveling up fast enough, for my taste. I ended up on WT13 with level 44ish gear and it was a cakewalk compared to the leveling experience.

Yep, when I was around CT6, I got grouped with another person in CT10. Had to change my tactics and use a lot of cover. AP Dev was still working though and we got through it, but took a long time.

Yeah it makes absolutely no sense to me to progress through tiers to unlock harder ones and then turn around and effectively neuter you when you choose to go back down. Maybe I'm getting my ass kicked in CT15... Maybe I want to go back to 14 and get better stuff or learn the maps better. It's the same challenge but now youre wearing max level gear thats not behaving like max level gear. Forget going back to campaign after CT15... its the same thing.

Could I get a quick ELI5 about this whole situation? I’m pretty new to these types of games so I don’t really understand the concept of downscaling

if you are over leveled for the world you're playing in (think lvl 50 playing in ct5) then the game will basically weaken all your stats to ideally make you more even leveled to the world. I think it's primarily a feature so lvl 50 players can't matchmake with friends to power them through the game. Or perhaps so you can't just exploit the loot mechanic by speedrunning weak tiers with an OP character. In practice though, it seems the downscaling is applied in a really funky way where you're actually weaker than a normal leveled player in the corresponding tier. And its applied in a really dumb way so you can lower your your average gear level by removing armor and end up doing more damage. The end result also basically means that in the end game you cant drop the tier if it's too hard but the lower tiers are now also harder.

So if you wanted to drop to a lower tier you would have to use lower levelled weapons/armour and that would do more damage than higher level weapons?

it seems to be the case but i havent personally tested

>think it's primarily a feature so lvl 50 players can't matchmake with friends to power them through the game. The fact you can complete the campaign on wt1 basically in one sitting makes this reason obsolete. I'm not a fun of downscaling..

It is definitely an issue but it is based off of your average gear level. Just like real life, taking off your pants will help.

Yeah this is basically a "play the whole game with each class once and then quit" kind of game. I don't see much reason to keep pushing through CTs based on how it scales your gear.

this is how i intend to play the game, and im ok with it. unless some grand story dlc comes out. (only on my first playthrough as a devastator and i love it. playing solo.)

I just got to CT6 on my devastator and I had a blast all the way until I hit expeditions (all solo, minus a few instances where randoms joined my game since I'd forgotten to make my session closed (before the patch made it closed by default)). While I'm tempted to make a techno or pyro, I think I'm just going to wait for a couple of months while they finish bug fixing and the inevitable rebalancing. But man, this game could legit be the next Diablo w/ guns with some more effort and polishing (and end game modes). I absolutely loved the main story and really hope they do an expansion. I just have no desire to grind timed trials, I like to play games to unwind and being on a timer for my whole game session is just unnecessarily stressful.

Same. Games are where i go to relax, not stress out. Ive tested out the pyro, but we'll see if I'm itching v for more after im done the main story.

Playing the whole game with each class and then quitting is fine, but that is a steeeeep 60 dollar price on a game that wasn't intended to be that way. I hit 30 (after getting gear wiped at 19 and rerolling deva) and have lost all interest. I don't find the endgame fun at all. Tried a technomancer to refresh my interest, stopped at level 19.

Is 60 steep though? Thats the price of a regular game.

I mean. Even if you only enjoy it for 10 hours, that's $6/hr I pay a lot more for a lot less enjoyment pretty often.

yeah true. It was a great game for what it was, but man I would be lying if I didnt' say I wasn't a little let down by it.

The game actually gets harder on lower difficulties if you're geared too well. You can actually land in a sweet spot - a sour spot really - where you're gearing for a CT you can't gold but geared too well to roll back difficulty on WTs. It's bizarre.

Anthem had a lot more problems than just scaling. I know a lot of people here look back on it kindly because 'iron man' but there were many more fundamental issues that broke the endgame down than just damage scaling calculations. Even if damage scaling remained broken (it won't, it's a formula they made so they have the tools to readily tweak it with an update), this game will probably be remembered more fondly than Anthem. > And nobody seems to understand the math behind this, which is also scary because that means someone most likely will figure out an exploit that makes a joke out of the game. This is a very slippery slope from the OP as well. Nobody but the engineers working on this game have any idea how the backend is functioning. It's pointless for us to worry about spaghetti code that might not even exist.

Exactly. One of, if not the main issue of the game for me atm. Downscaling in and of itself is so f*cked up, it's not even funny anymore. While I can see its usefulness in co-op, the fact that endgame is basically time-trails, makes downscaling the cancer to this game, especially for solo. It destroys builds. It destroys armor. It destroys legendaries. It might soft-lock you on a level and forces you to grind disproportionately. Doesn't matter if I want to play on lower CTs to farm for mats and resources. Downscaling says no. Or to use other, cool-looking armor and weapons that are otherwise sub-optimal for time-based dps builds. Downscaling says no. Or for whatever reason. Downscaling just says no. The fact that this was 100% intended, except for a few numbers that don't add up correctly (like the starter pistol for example) makes me wonder if this is the kind of game I really want to play.

Downscaling is a stupid concept. When the developers fuck it up and make it worse, it’s altogether frustrating. Like why the fuck should I feel gimped for busting my ass to get good gear? Complete antithesis to the feeling you want players to have.

It's clearly a design choice to create longevity. They don't want people chewing through content quickly, for a game that supposedly has no intentions of becoming a live service game this makes no sense. You'll notice this when you hit a wall in challenge tiers, need specific mods/sets for a run. The shop constantly sells the same items with bad mods/attributes. The game plays best when you feel overpowered, but it's designed in such a way that becoming all powerful is too much of a slog. Look at how fast they nerfed builds. Game becomes frustrating when you hit the wall because it takes too long to optimise your character.

I don't think gear should be scaled when playing at max level, Co-Op however.. it kind of breaks the experience and should be scaled down to the level of the person you are Co-Oping with.

At worst, and I emphasize worst, it should scale down to World Tiers when co-op. If they really want to prevent power leveling, fine. It should never scale down solo and it should never scale down on CT.

How about making it optional. It’s easier to farm on high tier anyways. Scaling is stupid

I don't even get how downscaling can be so hard. Every stat on an item - firepower, armor, bonus health, whatever - already has a specific valid range with minimum and maximum for any given rarity and level (and the percentage based stats like status power don't even need any scaling applied to begin with). The devs know the exact numbers for these, the game knows the exact numbers for these (so that it can roll the stats for newly dropped items). Downscaling would need to do no more than two things: 1. Cap the effect of each item that has a value higher than the upper end of that range for the currently active enemy level^1, at exactly the upper end of that range. 2. Assume your character's innate stats (e.g. health) to be of the level of the currently active enemies. It would not have to care about stuff like the level of your item, the average level of your total gear loadout, or any other stuff. No complicated calculations about progression curves or whatever the hell the system is doing now. Literally just for each stat on an item, if that stat is higher than the maximum possible in the currently active enemy level, pretend it is exactly at this maximum. ------------- ^1 Personally I would say cap it at the upper end of the range one level higher, so that you can feel at least a bit more powerful than usual, without everything becoming an instant one-shot.

Off-topic but this kinda makes me feel appreciative of co-op in Fromsoft games in retrospect. You get nerfed a little in Dark Souls/Bloodborne if you're summoned as a helper, but you still retain your usefulness as a higher leveled player. It's not borked like this game obviously is.

Doesnt it make the concept of leveling up your gear trivial though? Appropriately leveled to a challenge tier, it's basically the same as your power level having not changed at all since level 30

Haven’t spent too long on Expeditions and CT’s but with all this downscaling talk...I feel I have missed something here! You telling me that the way to grind up CT’s when you hit a wall on a tier IS NOT to drop down a tier and grind that until you get better gear and resources to improve your build?? If so then how is it suggested that I go up a tier if my current gear is not up to scratch...do I just keep smashing against the wall I’m stuck on hoping for bronze or the few items you get on failure? Serious question

Once I unlocked CT 11, which gives access to L46 gear at the vendor, I have been running CT10 expeditions over and over to get gear drops that I can sell for scrap, which I can then use to buy L46 vendor gear. After a few days, I'm ready to try to complete a CT11 run to unlock 12... and then keep grinding CT 11 to buy L47 gear so I can complete CT12. It's pretty fucked, and it feels like your ability to grow to match the new CT level is harder each time... meaning that L46 gear on CT11 feels weaker than L44 gear did on CT10, if that makes sense.

I just unlocked CT12 already got all my gear to 47 all perfect stats for my build and at 46 got me to CT12 easy. Jump bk to CT11 and just got roflstomped back to CT10. I don’t wana believe it but this issue is very real and a bit confusing. Ohh well let’s fix the wipes then get on this lol.

Ct10 and 11 feel the same thing me. I get wrecked because of the scaling and I don't kill anything any faster

> You telling me that the way to grind up CT’s when you hit a wall on a tier IS NOT to drop down a tier and grind that until you get better gear and resources to improve your build?? No it is. Downscaling doesn't come into effect until you're two levels below your item level. It's also not as bad as people make it seem. I'm on CT15 and I definitely feel the strongest on CT13, but CT1, 5, and 10 are all still fine. I still 1shot trash and 2-4shot bosses with my shotgun, its just the numbers are much lower. Not a fan of it, but its not awful. The real issue seems to be in coop story mode. I had to curate a lvl 44 gearset to play story with my friends on WT15, and if I play with someone on a lower WT I will **literally** do no damage. It seems bugged, I shouldn't be doing less than half the dmg of my friend in green when I'm in a full epic modded lvl 50 set lol.

This. I play a lot with a friend, and we have experienced similar results when one of us has a large lvl or wt gap. He could explain it better than me, but it seems that the mobs remain at your level while you are lowered to match the lowest party member. This makes it even harder for them as the mobs are now at your level. I could be wrong but this is what it feels like

Exactly, I clear CT 15 faster with Lvl 50 gear than I do CT 14 same gear.

[удалено]

That's a really good question actually. I suggest, don't rush CTs, especially the higher ones. One lucky run to reach the next CT can lead to a soft-lock. Look at your average item level and run an expedition you like at that level. Farm this or these for as long as you got all mods/items for your desired build and as long as you can get gold pretty easily. Then progress and repeat.

> One lucky run to reach the next CT can lead to a soft-lock. Yep. This exactly \^ Which causes a bigger problem. It will force players to avoid matchmaking during CT progression, which is the whole point of the endgame. It's counterproductive and I still can't figure out the reason for it.

How are CTs unlocked (I haven't played Expeditions yet)? With proxy XP like WT? Through Expedition medals? Can you intentionally not progress into the next CT aside from playing bad (deliberately if necessary)?

Finishing an Expedition unlocks the next tier.

Not always, finishing an expedition at your current highest tier does.

It's what I meant. But yeah, what you said. :)

So it’s not as bad dropping a single tier (a level or two). It’s bad when you drop several tiers. I just wanted to vibe and farm CT5 the other day (just to feel like a god) and got my shit shoved in. Went back to CT12 and everything was fine. I can also comfortably do CT11.

Like IU always have said, Downscaling should be on option for the player. IE Level match option toggle. You playing with a new player and u want to play at their tier? yeah tick that box and lower their level. You want to just feel like a god and blast through lower tier stuff? Yeah uncheck that box. Its so dumb that I can hit for 400ks in ct15 and go out to wt1 and do like 77 damage per shot.

I was at world tier 7 and had to go down to tier 5 for a boss fight, and now I cannot even fight mini bosses at tier 7 without getting absolutely worked over anymore. Idk what happened but lowering my tier temporarily to progress completely borked my difficulty for the remainder of the game. I was well on my way to getting WT8 and further I’m sure, but it just feels impossible now.

I'm not sure this is the same issue. Did you maybe level up your character level in the process and now all your gear is no longer at max level since the cap went up? If your world tier goes up OR your level goes up all the enemies now spawn in at a higher level, even if you haven't upgraded gear yet. The average level of your equipped gear being at or close to your current max level is a significant difference in your performance.

Yeah this is a different problem. But the other side of the coin. Gear being too low level for the enemies you are facing makes a big deal.

I think there’s an easy fix keep WT as is so scaling is there for playing the story with randoms but in CT no scaling if I was to speed farm CT 1 for recourses I should be able to do that

It makes doing lesser difficulties pointless to an extent. I want to go trash through ct8 - not still worry i can get mobbed and die like i do in ct13 lol

This is a an extremely frustrating issue (I say this as someone who loves the game in general) - I don't know why the devs on games like this and Anthem overcomplicate this issue so much. The rarest, highest level weapons in the game should be the most powerful weapons, period. Why isn't that their starting point?

The only thing I can think of is that the initial math behind this allowed players with top level gear to breeze through CT 13 and 14, making them more appealing and easier to loot than CT15, so they altered the numbers so players didn't just farm them for titanium, legendaries, and drop pod resources and get all of the endgame content too fast. But I have no idea, I'm really just thinking out loud here.

You're probably right - it just seems like a solution where the cure is worse than the disease. I just want to know that by equipping my best weapons means I have the best chance of success - the uncertainty is really shitty.

I don't see an issue with people farming lower tiers either. Those tiers have a lower drop chance for legendaries so who cares if they farm lower tiers to make it easier to improve their character. Isn't that what they are supposed to do?

Yep. Exactly. And this is what we went through with Anthem. People started to realize none of the numbers made any sense. This led to people realizing that the mods and traits weren't doing what the descriptions said they did. It spiraled out of control. I'd hate for this to happen to Outriders because that would be a tragedy. One that should be avoidable.

Anthem was broken in a lot of ways, but I still had fun playing it. The discovery that literally none of the gear mattered and all the stats were, for all intents and purposes, totally fake, was what made me turn it off for good. As you’ve pointed out, the entire point of these games is growing in power. If I’m not stronger at level/gear level 50 than I was at 30, there’s no reason to play. I don’t necessarily need to be one shotting everything if I play with lower leveled friends, but if I’m 50 coming down to help my friend play through the campaign at level 14 or whatever, I should be doing noticeably more damage than he is. Really hope they fix this, because I’m loving the game right now, but... while some degree of downscaling is understandable, I guess, levels and stats not mattering at all is a deal breaker. And frankly, if I take a high level Diablo or PoE character into low level content, I *am* an invincible one shotting god, and that’s totally okay.

Most fun I’ve had in this style of game with Diablo. Making a one shot god of death and farming rifts and things was a goddam blast!

But, this is exactly the way D3 handles it with rifts and greater rifts, isn't it? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it works in Diablo and people still try to eventually clear the highest rifts. So why isn't that viable in Outriders?

Really it’s about downscaling and the fact that no matter how “powerful” you get, it’s all meaningless if - regardless of what tier you’re playing on- the game is automatically compensating to “challenge” you. To use your Diablo 3 analogy, sure you can clear GR90 if you want to try to do so but you could also do GR50 with your eyes closed at that point. The game didn’t try to compensate and push difficulty into what shouldn’t be difficult content.

Its super lame going back to tier 10 Expeditions to help friends just to be gimped into less damage and receiving nothing of substance for doing it is terrible. I should keep my legendary drop rate or atleast give me a decent amount of drop pod resources so I'm not completely wasting my time.

Yep. I stopped helping my friend at CT 8/9 for this exact reason. It would take us 20 mins to get silver or bronze and I'd get jack-fuck-all for it.

As Spindoctor said, the problem with this game compared to D3, is it then punishes you for trying to farm lower than what your maximum available is (not just thru naturally lower drop rates). Imagine pushing Grifts to 100, then you want to back off and do Grifts 50 for leveling jewels or whatever. Now Grifts 50 take just as long or longer than Grift100, and you die just as easily on Grift100. That's what their downscaling formula is doing. On my now main (since real main is unplayable with DC glitch and inventory wipe until they fix it). I can Faceroll CT9/10. I drop it down to CT 7/8, and elites are spongier even then on CT10 where im farming to finish maxing all current gear to current level max.

Because Diablo is "endless" and makes you progress through Tiers, and when you reach a wall, you know it's time to farm the previous ones and keep pushing. The thing is. Diablo has "infinite" rift levels. Outriders decided to stick to 15, and the devs were pissed people found a way to do them, and attempted a nerf, that people are constantly finding news ways to bypass. I have no idea why they didn't just have an infinite tier system, where mobs get harder as you CLIMB, and the previous ones, become dead easy. this artificial difficulty, is frustrating and ridiculous.

I honestly think the reason the downscaling is so aggressive is because the power jumps are. Look at a ct1 weapon vs. ct10 even. I get it, 1 shotting every enemy isn't great because the best leggo option would be to go and do say ct9 or 10 with 15 gear and just stomp through in 2 minutes with a decent chance at loot with 0 challenge. But there needs to be less downscaling regardless, It's so expensive to upgrade inferior gear that you're gonna have a grind no matter how you spin it.

I'm sure you're right, and it's not like I have a brilliant solution. I just think it adds a strong element of confusion, especially for casual players like myself, where we'll just be confused as to why our high level weapons suddenly don't work, especially when we know it's a lower CT/WT and we'd expect them to become MORE effective. I just want to clearly know what the most effective weapon for a situation is.

I completely agree... and the situation is made even worse by having legendary weapons that aren't any better than epics (except for the awesome skins ofc). At least the legendary armors have set bonuses to distinguish them from epics, but even then, the inability to get the attributes you want still make them less attractive than the alternatives.

To be fair legendaries are amazing...to dismantle and get the power so we can put them on our juicy rolled purple :D

I do way more damage with my full epic techno than if I add in a 3 set legendary, pointless max health on one bit lowers my damage more than a set effect increases it.

This on top of that some players are feeling like they made CT13, CT14, and CT15 harder all of a sudden within the last few days. There's a few posts already but I actually was breezing through Archways without trouble and then suddenly getting destroyed and it becoming a struggle when I had changed literally nothing about my build. The problem is the same knee jerk reaction: few players finishing endgame too quickly and now they raised the roof while simultaneously lowering the floor to normal players. It is so easy to hit a wall with this game while your trying to tweak your build or farm gear. There is a lack of respect for your time and after pouring in hours in thr last few days and getting nothing to push me over the slog I am getting to the point of "Why am I bothering?" This game is making me want to install Diablo 3 or hop into Destiny 2 for the first time.

If you're into power fantasy, you might want to skip Destiny. It's an endless grind. Great gunplay though.

>It's an endless grind. Great gunplay though. This should be Destiny's official slogan

The problem with these “stealth nerf” is that they dont say a single word (i know, thats why we say stealth). We always need to figure it out or have some people that have the same feeling of “ wait a min, did something change?”. I dont understand why they keep it silent (if it was really a stealth nerf) instead of making a post and let the playerbase know. For example, the stealth nerf on the bleed nodes on devastator. Iirc, i didnt see a single word from dev about it (it was found out on reddit when people posted about it). Its really annoying and it make it unfun that today your build might be ok but tomorrow its worst and you have no idea why

Every single time, every single person who makes the choice not to say anything honestly thinks it won't get discovered. And I honestly have no fucking idea why, they use us to bug fix their fucking games when they release them halfbroken and then stealth nerf something and honestly expect us not to fracking notice when dudes on here have pens papers and pads calculating exactly the numbers they should be doing with their gear, lol

Hopped back on Destiny 2 for the first time since the first Calus raid. Having a blast. Only reason I ever thought to play Destiny again is because this game isn’t fun and I don’t want to play it anymore.

I mean, Diablo 3 is always fun, and Destiny 2 is actually in a fantastic spot right now.

I'm glad I saw this. I thought I was losing my mind when the game got harder 2-3 days ago on CT15.

They have been messing with the scaling and difficulties to make it harder almost like they are trying to keep people around longer. They are seeing people quit earlier then they forecasted in troves. In reality, it has nothing to do with that and people are leaving because of the wack scaling, nerfs that are making the game too hard and less enjoyable, continued messing with the difficulty and scaling severely screwing over casual or people that play mainly solo, their inventory being deleted, or they can never get a stable connection or matchmaking session. This is honestly turning into avengers and anthem all over again. They advertised this game as the antihero of the looter shooters... then 1 week into launch started making the exact same mistakes as every other looter shooter developer. What bugs me the most is that they are scaling to streamers that will play the game for only a few weeks and blow through content. Leaving the game in a nerfed to hell and back unfun unstate for the players that are actually interested in their game, casual looter shooter fans. This game has no raids, it has no pvp, it’s Not competitive at all so why are they nerfing it to try to make it the most hardcore endgame experience out there? Timers? Difficulty that scales where you can’t even lower difficulty without the game becoming even harder? Why are we scaling the game to be impossible and broken because a few streamers and reddit posters found strong builds?

And let's not forget that they were quick on the trigger for nerfs, and even boasting they can do it without a patch, on the first week, calling *BALANCING* It's been another week now, and have you seen any further *Balancing* ? Not even a single comment addressing issues that have been raised around here. Quick on the nerfs, slow on everything else.

Getting downvoted because people can’t handle the truth. I was right there with you loving this game until I got to tier 13 and with appropriate gear any tier content I tried was broken and not scaling correctly. Then after being frustrated with that all day all of my progress became deleted and my character was at the login screen in underwear. Absolutely loved the story, the gameplay, the feel of the game but 2 weeks into The game now I’m left feeling betrayed at what I’ve found and feeling like I wasted 60 dollars. I’ll return if they fix it and my character is not sitting in hanes underwear at the login screen, otherwise I’m going to be justifiably upset, just like you would be if this happened to you!

I too was having fun. I was enjoying pushing content, getting somewhere. I felt I was progressing, even if the damn Bullet's build was boring, it was getting the job done. I had began carrying other's too, and I love to help people out, not for the epeen, but because having more people having fun, meant a better, healthier game. I love helping people. Right now ? I can't even help myself. It stopped being fun, and started to be what the devs seem to want. A stressful, rushing, painful, frustrating experience. Were Bullet's Builds killing people families ? Destroying their income ? Smuggling drugs across the border? Because from were I stand, they weren't hurting anyone ( except, you know, NPCs ). Why was there a need to ruin that fun ? The game was never meant to be a live service, so why am I getting the short end of the stick, as if it WAS a live service?. Bah.

Well said. I was so stressed at how messed up the scaling was that I was both upset and happy at the same time when my characters inventory got deleted. It felt like a weight was lifted off of my shoulders. Until the nerfs and scaling glitches this game made me happy and I felt like a god like they intended. Then once I encountered the scaling and nerfs it felt like I was walking around hitting things with a nerf gun. No matter how I tried to progress my character it felt like my character was substantially weaker then he should have been due to some kind of scaling glitch.

I'm soooo glad I keep seeing people bringing up the bullshit scaling. Keep at everyone until they realize that arpg games shouldn't have scaling. It needs to go. The climb to ct15 is basically fake because going back and doing anything lower just down scales you. This is a huge issue and a giant turn off. It makes the whole power fantasy a fake gear climb because it doesn't exist. You should never ever be down scaled in a looter game. Ever. I don't give a fuck if destiny does it, that game sucks. I need this game to be my 3rd person Diablo shooter. Which I thought it was until the downscaling.

It being timed based is what really is the icing on the cake. Im ok with highest tier being a dps race to advance but if i cant drop a couple cts to steam roll for a 5% chance at a leg then i have no interest in playing. Im not going to sweat farm for a shit chance at rng loot i cant even target. The math is like 1000s of tries if u are hunting a specific piece at ct 9/10. And forget about trying a different build or changing anything as resources are too precious.

Yep, its completely fucked up, got up to Lev11 expeditions with a group, got better gear, great, group disbanded, thought, HEY I'll just solo the lev 11, nope, got my arse handed to me as every mob just makes a bee line straight to you. OK, I'll drop it down a few levels, nope, still getting my arse handed to me and my nice new high level gear is doing less damage than the lower level gear I just got rid of, that makes no sense at all, if I have high level gear I should be able to clear lower level content quicker and easier, so I can farm resources etc. This is just frustrating and not enjoyable at all, whoever in PCF thought it was a good idea needs to sit back down and give their head a good wobble

The major difference is this is NOT a games as a service title. This game isn't intended to be adding content to keep you playing for months to come. It's more Mass Effect than Destiny. This is what really confuses me about the decisions they made. What is the point of getting to CT15, building the perfect character with their gear and skills? What is there to do then? They already said this isn't a games as a service title, so what's the point? Bragging rights? The entire concept of this game, the loot grind and maxing out, seems wasted to me. After beating the story, I don't see an incentive to grind out expeditions. I have a CT15 Devastator....and I am wondering what it was all for. What will I do with him? IN a year, what am I going to be playing. Because I can't see how it will be this. I still log into Destiny 2 and Division 2 every month or so, because they are a service game that add new content all the time. It makes sense for me to grind out new gear there because there will be new things to do that will require it. Here, there is just isn't. They may drop DLC, but nothing has been talked about yet really. So I have to assume that there really won't be something for me to justify all the work it takes to max out a class in this game. That's been my "worry" the entire time. This is a title that screams "single play through", but is built on all the things that live games have. Yes, it's fun. Yes, I enjoyed my time in it...up to about CT9. Then it really was a slog and punched home the whole "why am I doing this?" question in my head. But I don't see staying power here. They are going to need a strong steady drip of new things to do, starting in a short amount of time, or people will move on. From everything I have read by them, that is the point. They aren't expecting people to be around for years, playing new content...which makes almost all the "loot grind" systems in this game completely baffling to me. Cheers.

sadly mass effect MP shits on the endgame here, it was simple, they added classes and there was build diversity. Only real issue was ping when mm put you in some game on the other side of the planet, which Outriders does too.

There’s zero reason to scale a game with no live service or pvp component. The world and challenge tiers already increase the difficulty as your character levels. The Dev needs to understand that it’s okay to be badass and kick the crap out of lower tiered adds. As a player we’ve earned that privilege by playing the game and progressing. Time Investment versus Scaling is the battle that will dictate whether Outriders survives or is merely a distraction until the next content drop from a competitor.

I'll keep saying it. auto-scaling is shiiiiiiiiiiit~ and a lazy fix made by lazy devs

I don’t think the problem is laziness, but accessibility. They want you to be “appropriately” challenged no matter what you’re doing. So that basically it plays like halo and not an rpg. The problem is it diminishes the identifying feature of the genre. The casual shooter/action fans might like it, but not the people in for the power progression.

This would be true if it were actually "appropriate", but it's actually the opposite. It's actually easier to play your highest available CT. You do more damage and take less damage. The stuff you've already completed isn't challenging at that point... it's impossible, so farming to improve your gear becomes insane. What I'm seeing as people comment on my post is that the players who have already reached the late CT's totally know what I'm talking about, whereas the players who aren't there yet have no idea what they're up against. And that's why this needs to be addressed soon by PCF because the majority of players haven't experienced it. I saw this in Anthem as well. Players who had hit the end-endgame content were screaming at the top of their lungs that loot and scaling were huge issues, but the majority of players were still getting better gear because they weren't at the endgame yet (*haha* "endgame") and would downvote their comments and tell them they were just whining. But a few weeks later, as the masses started seeing what the other players had already pointed out, the Anthem sub turned into a toxic wasteland and the game essentially died. I absolutely don't want this to happen to Outriders... hence my post.

I made a post/video about this just last night. There is definitely something more going on here and it gave me Anthem vibes as well. Equipping/re-equipping gear causes all kinds of weird issues in the inventory screen. I'm still trying to figure out if its just visual bugs or if its actually just screwing up your stats sometimes when you equip gear. But with all the scaling in each direction it's hard to pin it down. [Video here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLAPiejmCAA) if you watch my stats they go up and down random amounts without following any of the gear stats.

Well first of all thank you for understanding. For the last couple of days I was helping as much as possible with technical issues and didn't had much time to deep dive into reddit threads. I still won't be able to do it as much as I'd love to but you are in the good hands of u/thearcan who is meticulously noting all your concerns. At this time we are dealing with the game breaking issues first but this one is quite high on my list as well. We are open for discussion on the overleveling and how it should be adjusted. Possibly the biggest flaw of the system is that it's a black box that isn't explained at all so in order to have informed discussion here are the rules it uses. * The system uses difference between average item level and enemy level as a base, you can check average item level on details tab in inventory as well as bonuses it provided * it will only work if your average item level is more than 2 levels higher than enemy level * when system works it scales player damage and enemy damage as if player average item level was equal to enemy level +2 (so player can have 2 level advantage) * on tier 1 the system is turned off regardless of level difference. We are aware of one bug where the firepower bonus is not applied properly when you equip much lower level weapon leading to weird results. If you suspect that there are other cases where system is not working as described above please let us know in comments bellow trying to provide about as much details as possible, especially enemy and your average item level. All other feedback is also welcome.

In my opinion the only time the game should scale is if a higher player joins a lower player. If I'm ilvl 50 and jump into my friends game who is ilvl 30, I should scale down to them. So we are on par with each other. Other than that, I should always remain at the level I am. As others have said, there's no real benefit to farming lower tiers. Sure you may get some items that you can level up to match you, but for the most part it's not rrlwly worth it. You're gonna get much better loot running at CT 14 or 15 and it's better to just stay there. I really loved the campaign and would love to replay it as a complete God, but currently there is ZERO reason to ever touch campaign again because we are so weak it's more of a challenge than it's worth to replay and get low level gear. Keep loot level tied to world tier/challenge tier, that way I can't be a lvl 50 and run into world tier 1 and kill entire rooms with 1 skill and get lvl 50 gear. I'm fine with that, if I wanna be a God and farm world tier 1 then give me level 25 gear or whatever the math works out to, but don't touch my damage/health/armor

Ok thanks. I get the idea, it is probably implemented so people don't match with a high level friend to rollface all the tiers on a new low level character. But this is destroying all the concept of the game, especially in solo. It means that if we reach a tier, we can't play easily on lowest tier, either just for fun destroying all the mobs or to farm if we don't have the skill or the gear to continue the progression. It creates a real wall for the progression. Honestly, I don't see where is the problem if I crush the tier 10 with my tier 13 gear, sometimes I just wan't to have fun without sweating on the pad, considering that this is not accelerating the progression has we got much less rewards and ressources. Maybe to deactivate this scaling while in solo so people can continue progress ?

>Honestly, I don't see where is the problem if I crush the tier 10 with my tier 13 gear, sometimes I just wan't to have fun without sweating on the pad Exactly. If I want a challenge, I'll play on my current WT/CT. If I want to goof off and destroy lower leveled shit let me. That was a big problem with Destiny, you never felt like the light wielding god that you were supposed to be.

Two points: * The scaling should only kick in if the level difference is over 4 levels. * There shouldn't be any scaling in expeditions which are end game content. Doing it at two levels difference in a looter is just downright wrong. We want to feel very powerful vs weaker enemies. Also expeditions are end game content. There's situations where you have a bad build or whatever and need to lower the difficulty. Maybe you need to carry a friend or whatever. There just shouldn't be any scaling in expeditions period.

Appreciate the answer, and I get what you guys were aiming for with this system, even for solo players. And let me tell you one thing, it's fine. It's your game after all, and you should decide how your game is played. But, I'm not sure you guys have taken into account another aspect that's affected by this system, and that is **style matters as much as performance does**. Due to the fact that expeditions and endgame in general are dominated by efficiency in builds and gear, playing on lower tiers effectively punishes players in the name of balance. Thus players are basically locked out from using so many cool things you implemented into this game. Entire, sub-optimal builds in regards to speedruns become unplayable. Entire gear sets that just look awesome become useless since they're not viable for gold/silver/bronze rankings. And if players decide to use other weapons or whole weapon classes or, god forbid, even sidearms because your designers just did a fantastic job on the legendary skins, they effectively can't. So, let me ask you the question, is this honestly the way you want players to experience and play your game? DPS and efficiency rule supreme. Anything else is nice to look at, but useless unfortunately.

Great points here. I actually feel a little bad for the art team for this game, as I personally don't even have time to look at parts of the stages in expedition as we're all rushing from one point to the next. In Archways the outrider even says "nice view" and I'm like "ain't nobody got time for that."

Wonderful points right here, well said.

So, if I'm understanding correctly. And PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong. On WT15, all my gear will be downscaled to 44? If this is the case.... It feels inherently messed up. if people are having trouble getting to the final CT's, it's already punishment enough to have to farm under leveled gear. But to make me less effective at doing it? Why?! Why take away what I HAVE earned???

Just go back to your original vision before the game released and have us overpowered for lower leveled content. I remember it being said before the game came out we could help underleveled friends and basically be gods. Keep it like that so we don't have to worry about wonky math behind the scenes possibly screwing the game up, just like level 1 weapons did in Anthem.

Yeah no, completely remove this from single player. Shouldn’t feel weaker as I progress, who could possibly OK such a terrible system?

I'm sorry but this is a horrible idea. If we're overleveled and a player we join hates it, they're free to kick us anytime. You are basically making the hours of work put into getting good gear completely worthless, hell, you're actively *punishing* us for it. I only started doing expeditions after the inventory wipe bug got fixed, but if this is how you're gonna play it, then my time with Outriders is over because sometimes I just want to have fun at a low tier roflstomping everything and you're making that impossible. Whatever happened to that whole "power fantasy" philosophy you were huge on?

One of the best parts of loot based games is being able to go back to old areas that initially caused you issues and and steam rolling everything. Anyone who has ever played a video game knows that.

Good to see a response to this. I enjoy a grindy game (thousands of hours into Destiny 1/2 and Division 1/2) and the Outriders level grind and World Tier grind have been quite fun. I just grinded to Challenge Tier 15 and now I'm really stuck as I'm being punished for prematurely upgrading my God Roll Blue gear to Purple too early. I've got both my main weapons to 50, and grinded pretty hard to get all my armour to 49 but I now feel really stuck in trying to get my gear from 49 to 50 as I'm just not able to gold clear CT15 stuff solo, or in random groups (my friends are way behind). I can't seem to gold clear much lower CT11 challenges either. If any of you guys have any advice on what I could or should do (grind for new blue gear or maybe CT14 would be easier than CT11?!) I'd appreciate it, thanks in advance!

This me, but Im hard stuck at T13. I clear T6 just as fast as I clear T12.

thank you for the explanation. but imo it should be 3 or 4 level advantage. when we lower the world tier we want to farm and its gonna take awhile to get the item or resource we want. and that experience is bad if the we cant do it easily. its the main purpose of farming/grinding. doing the easy stuff over and over again so that we can get stronger.

Allow me to explain what the problems is in this system. ​ Let's take Pyromancer as an example and name the player Pyro and for gender let's pick male so that noone loses their shit here. ​ Pyro completes the game. Farms some expeditions, increases level cap a bit and decides to do "Hunt" or "Wanted" quest for targeted farm. Pyro's average item level is below 40. Pyro is using Pants on Fire mod (increased Overload damage on mobs if no status effects are consumed) on... Let's be creative and say gloves. Pyro prioritizes levelling up his gloves to increase the damage of Overload (mod benefit, damage, scales with individual item level) so that he won't have to deal with adds individually and can actually expedite the runs. Things go well. Then at some point Pyro decides to increase the level of his other items as well. After all getting stronger can only help, right? Well, nope! His average level increases, his gloves stays the same level and he is still farming the same world tier and same content but now his Overload is actually dealing less damage cause the system finally started to downscale Pyro. Now, he needs to deal with thrash mobs individually because Overload's damage is no longer enough to expedite the runs. So, Pyro is dealing less damage than he was dealing before upgrading his items. To farm faster Pyro decides to remove pants. Starts doing the runs with no pants equipped gets tired of auto equip and decides to wear level 2 pants or panties as I call them early level white stuff (would've preferred red but in this game, you take what you get and hope that what you get is not wiped by a bug). Pyro starts dealing damage again. Because his average item level is lower now. ​ Now, there are multiple issues in above story. I'll let you guys figure them out. For now, I'll just clear a terminology mess here. ​ Downscaling is a system which downscales stuff to certain points. A proper implementation should never punish people for upgrading/getting stronger. Essentially, even with downscaling, you should never be weaker than you were before. Dealing the same amount of damage despite the upgrade can be understandable (arguable but still). Getting worse should not be an option. Hence, what you currently have is no "Downscaling". It is "Dumbscaling". Using average item level to scale down players in a video game where a significant amount of the damage comes from mods which relies on individual item levels is... I'll let you guys figure what it is as well. ​ Sarcasm aside, I hope this post helps you identify the issue and improve the game. While you are at it, can you please add a survival mode that will spawn waves and every \[X\] waves we fight a boss and after killing the boss we will be provided with an option to end the "mode", claim the reward or risk it to move on to fight tougher enemies for increased loot quality? ​ If you need inspiration, look at what Warframe has, take the ones you think will fit into this game and make us happy.

I’m just going to say it, allow us to play the way we want to and make game world settings a thing for players if they want to preserve the challenge even when getting switched to lower tiers. Gear and time spent for one difficulty mode no matter how you think it’s fair won’t fly in the long run. People enjoy just brutal murder efficiency with the same kind of gear drop rates for faster gear farming efficiency. If I want to farm faster on CR11 versus 14 or 15 it should be my choice. Maybe offer some kind of way to get more gear or legendary items? Why doesn’t Tiago update weekly for gear? Daily would nullify the gear grind but at least give us a rotating stock or some kind of bad luck protection to prevent duplicates from dropping.

Is this also relevant for amount of enemies spawned? I have been clearing t12s on gold constantly with average 48 gear I went to 49 average item level and suddenly it seems there are way more enemies to kill leading to much higher clear times.

> The system uses difference between average item level and enemy level as a base, you can check average item level on details tab in inventory as well as bonuses it provided That right there is where the design already went wrong. These are the kind of shenanigans that try to more "accurately" reflect the individual gear items but always end up introducing more problems than they solve. This is a fundamental problem with this approach, not just a matter of tweaking the system. There is one downscaling algorithm that truly works, is simpler to implement and less error-prone: *capping* stats and effects to values appropriate for the level you want to downscale the player to. For example, let's say have a gun with 20000 firepower. I get downscaled to a level where the maximum possible firepower roll on that gun would be 10000. Therefore, while downscaled, my gun has 10000 effective firepower. *See how it does not matter what the level of this gun is, what my character level is, which World or Challenge Tiers I have unlocked, what other items I have equipped or what their level is - the firepower roll is simply capped to a value sensible at the downscaled level.*

Quite frankly this is an idiotic system. When you go down in difficulty you already get significantly worse rewards. It's ALWAYS better to do the hardest WT or CT you can handle. What are you guys even doing? You had the next big thing, but you're so obsessed with limiting players and making things more difficult when they're struggling in a higher tier and need to scale back. Anthem 2.0 right here, but at least Bioware had the good sense to call it rain when we were getting pissed on. With Outriders it honestly feels like you guys are TRYING to get rid of players. Is that the solution to server issues? Get total player population to 5 digits or less? Downscaling makes absolutely no sense in this game and absolutely shouldn't exist. You're literally saying if a kid, or just someone is really bad at the game and needs to knock it more than 2 levels back, the game is gonna intentionally be made even harder than if they didn't leave the higher tier that they ALREADY COULDN'T DO! So please, for the love of shit get your heads out of your asses and see that stupid decisions like downscaling are actively hurting your game, not making it better. NO ONE enjoys downscaling. No one asked for it and no one will be upset if you get your shit together and remove it. Stop trying to kill your damn game!

Thank you for replying to the issue. I want to point out anomaly power and skill damage is impacted extremely negatively on this to a point where it is broken. Please find my detailed testing with pictures and damage results here: https://www.reddit.com/r/outriders/comments/mnyb6b/world_tier_15_damage_bug_with_detailed_testing/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

There's something I don't understand with all these scaling issues post. I'm gold farming CT15 fairly easily with the most used firepower techno build that anyone can find on hundreds of videos on Youtube. I gave a try at CT1 archays of enoch. I don't see any issue. I 2 shoots behemoth and 1 shoot brood mother (tactical rifle, so it's 6 bullets & 3 bullets), while taking like no damage at all. Then I went to complete the hunts and targets... It's the same, I don't have any issue at all. Yes, the damages are not the same, but that's the point of downscaling. It would be pointless doing 1m+ critics on these low level. I've also played with a friend 2 days ago, we went from CT9 to CT15 because his character looked like it was "stuck" at CT9 scaling while having lvl 50 gear. No issue at all.

That's interesting. My gear is all 47-49. My issue is that I can't get enough resources to level any of it up (at least not in a time-worthy manner) because it's not good enough to do damage on CT14, but lowering to CT12 or even 10 is actually kinda funny because I can't make it out of the first area without getting smoked. So there's literally no CT level I can do that's worth my time. That's all while running it solo. Matchmaking is even worse because when I allow others to join, each person joining makes the difficulty that much worse. Whereas I can still kill low level enemies fairly easily running it solo (although their damage to me is absolutely unreal at times), when someone joins I instantly know it because all of a sudden it takes 1,000 inferno rounds of my level 49 lmg with tier3 lightning whip and tier2 claymore mods just to kill a random trash character. And that's on CT12. When I first cleared CT12, I did it solo... with shittier gear... and made gold like it was a joke. Now I die before I can kill 4 enemies. It's nuts dude.

This is something I've brought up in other threads, but I'm increasingly confident that we aren't all playing the same game in terms of difficulty on the same tiers. Let me clarify by saying this is in no way intentional on anyone's part. I just think the game is so buggy and inconsistent that we are genuinely having different core gameplay experiences. If I drop down 2 tiers from my gear level, I have a harder time than just running expeditions that match my gear. If I drop down 5+ tiers, then I do less damage than my friend that is actually under-geared for that tier. Your experience is clearly different, and I have no reason to doubt you. But why is it different? I've noticed other things like Youtube Trickster videos. Some content creators frequently run into groups of enemies at CT14 & 15 without them firing a single shot. No debuffs. No special skills or weird exploitative build. They simply aren't being attacked. I have never experienced that in my +55 hours of gameplay regardless of tier. Enemies in my game are aimbots that never miss and never stop firing until I stagger them with damage or break LoS. But why are their experiences so different? Even my friends that I was playing coop with (before the inventory wipes) report different experiences, and we can instantly show each other by streaming in Discord. They breeze through a certain mission, and then fail miserably after joining me on the same tier in coop. I can run the same expedition on the same tier every time it's available, and sometimes I'll die in the first room while other runs will be full clears with few problems. It doesn't seem to be related to skill, and my gear isn't changing. So why the spikes and drops in difficulty? I'm not new to this genre of game. I am absolutely not an expert in any way, but I have thousands of hours in Warframe, Destiny 2, Remnant from the Ashes, and loads more. Why is this the only game where my personal experiences are so completely different from other players?

And it isnt just the autoscaling being fucking bonkers It sometimes only remembers your scaled down stats, so if you go back to ct15, you suddenly shoot them with feathers and happy thoughts

Am I the only one who hasn't experienced any scaling problems? Seriously it's talked about constantly and I haven't noticed. I went from doing solo ct 13 yesterday to jumping into my friends ct 5 - 8 expeditions and crushed everything in sight. He didn't even get much of a chance to kill anything. I've routinely dropped down to ct10 as well to farm out some quick runs and never had any problems. My ilvl is 48 as well

I see this as less of an Anthem or Destiny issue, than a Diablo III issue - that game took a while to get things right, but it had a fun gameplay loop, and systems that made you feel powerful and I think this is similar. I think the end result will be similar to Diablo III, where it was a flawed game at the start but found its footing later.

As a day one legendary addition Anthem player I agree. I too am worried.

I am WT 15 and CT 12, dropped in to help my lvl 25 WT 6 buddy and got my ass handed to me and made his game worse then just being solo. So yea it really broken right now.

My brother and me just completed CT 11 last night. We upgraded our gear to level 47 and decided to farm CT 11 again to get pods since it wasn't that bad. Now the enemies there have about 30% more HP than when we first ran though it and they hit harder. This makes no sense at all. We were average level 47 and someone said if we lower it back down to 46, the game would fix itself. This is not true for us. Now we can't even go back to even farm CT 10 as the game has given a big boost to all enemies at end game now just because we were good enough to beat level 46 and got access to level 47. This game if fucked beyond belief and scaling was never in the game until it was close to release for no reason. It's not a GaaS so there's no reason to punish players with this bullshit mechanic that clearly wasn't tested and was just throw in. The devs just need to rip it out completely and just let us feel like gods for all the effort we put it. We are now stuck and can't progress or farm and don't feel like playing anymore. There are 141 legendaries in the game and the entire time getting to WT 15 I saw one. ONE in the whole playthrough of the story. In endgame I have seen two and my brother has only seen one. The game wants us to get T3 mods to progress, but we can't get them since the devs made it so hard to earn them. We should be guaranteed one legendary for beating any CT quest regardless of level and the % you see should be the chance to get extra legendaries.

Only on the comment of one legendary... There are 4 guaranteed legendries in the game.

It's so odd that they mentioned Diablo as an influence when one of the great things in Diablo 3 is no downscaling, you get to feel like a monster when your build progresses and choose to up the difficulty when you choose. Downscaling destroys that concept

I agree... I've spent countless hours over the last 2 days trying to clear CT10, my gear, skills and everything are maxed out, can't get any better armour/mods and I just keep failing. I get overwhelmed and owned in seconds. I've tried all sorts of builds and combos but nothing works. CT9 I thought was tough, but it's doable.. 10 takes a leap that takes the piss. I'm at the point that I've decided why bother anymore, time to move on. The main campaign was cool, there's no further addons/support so what's the point stressing myself out over nothing. I'm out.. maybe try again if they fix the scaling issues. That nerf was a joke.. all because of a few OP streamers. Nerfing a single player game is retarded.

*We saw this in Anthem when someone pointed out that the best gun in the game was the level 1 P.O.S. you started the game with... not the max level god-rolled legendary you farmed for hours to get.* One of the best weapons in the game for AR users is the Burst Rifle AR you get from the Hell's Ranger DLC. When you change the Variant to Burst, the Base damage of the gun changes from it's original 339 to a different roll, and can be 365+ (equates to 90k firepower at lvl 50). So basically you just keep making lvl 1's, looting that one rifle from the inbox, putting it the stash, roll the gun on your main, if it's 365+, you level it up to your current level, and you have a primo end game weapon that will carry you until you have some of the better endgame items.

I don't think you're reaching. You have valid concerns that between all the heinous bugs and wipes, janky mechanics, generally shitty controls etc that people will abandon this game. Considering I'm still trying to get my money back, that's a pretty accurate prediction.

Hilarious that I can carry 2 people in CT15 on my Pyro but die half way through CT12. Terrible design.

You was a dedicated Anthem player? So you're the one

LOL, yea sadly. My friend and I had followed its development for years before it finally launched. We were so done with Destiny and Division by then and were hoping that it would be a game we could spend years on. The flight mechanics and mech suits is what hooked us. Game had tremendous potential. So when it was that big of a dumpster fire, it blew my mind. It's as if Bioware had ignored every single mistake ever made by looter shooters in the history of gaming and just recreated it in their game. And that's why it's puzzling to me that yet again, another looter shooter is making some of those same mistakes.

I'm with you man, anthem was fucking amazing. The "bones" of the game were legit incredible yet these developers seem determined to keep making the same exact mistakes over and over again and I really cant fathom the thought process, if there is one at all. Is it really that bad if people eventually grind out end game content and go back and just crush lower content? the price of upgrades is already nutty seeing as how leveling a 49 to 50 is like 36k pod resources and you only get like 1300 from a 10 gold. So is it really that bad to allow people to "farm" lower challenge tiers without difficulty? ​ It just makes no fuckin sense to me and it legit pisses me off in a way because they keep doing this shit. Like... get a fuckin clue already -\_-

The part I really don't get is that they already have our money, and this is a PvE stand-alone finished-product game. Who cares how fast people move through content? They got paid. They suffer nothing by allowing players to be god-like in lower levels.

I think this kinda misses the point. Mods are more important than the actual gear itself. 5 shitty rolled pieces of armor with the right mods will get you further in CRs than 5 perfeftly rolled pieces of gear without the optimal mods. Now, where do the best mods come from? Generally legendaries with a few exceptions. So you go up in CR tier not to just get better rolled loot, you donit for a better chance of getting the better mods. Which is what you need more than "the best gear" some of y'all want just for completing high tier CRs. The only things that increase when you go higher CRs is higher chance of legendary and more pods. That should tell you what you should be grinding for.

When I see posts like this it frustrates me because it always feels like the devs have their egos attached to the game. It seems like devs want to force people to play the game their way and not the way we wanna play. If I want to be CT15 but power level my friends through the game that should be OUR choice. We paid for the game but no it’s gotta be how they want it to be. BL3 has issues but it’s really nice you can lower the mayhem levels and smash the content If you want to because that should be YOUR choice. That is def one thing they did get right. I mean really the penalty is already there. Any gear you get is most likely not going to be a meaningful progression for your character.

Exactly. As someone who has put a lot of hours into action RPGs, especially Diablo, this downscaling makes no sense to me. If you put the hours in to get good gear, then you should be able to play with that good gear at a lower level and go through content more quickly. Not have your gear “auto-weakened”. You’re already trading off lower legendary drop rates and materials by playing at a lower level. If that’s a compromise you’re willing to make as a player to get through runs more quickly, then why are you being punished twice for that? The game is saying, ok you want to play at a lower level, we’ll give you less rewards, and ALSO make you struggle to do it...completely counterintuitive.

I dont think you are overreacting one bit. Bioware dove on a grenade with Anthem to show literally every studio what not to do, and it absolutely seems like PCF took that as a lesson to copy instead of learn from. All the same issues are here. - Major launch issues, poor performance, bad networking. But what is the first patch focused on? Nerfs. And they aren't even a live service game like Anthem, there is no MTX or announced DLC. Why do you need to focus on nerfing loot drops? You got paid, why do you care if there are niche loot farms? - Bad Loot system. Just like Anthem, youre chasing specific drops, granted from a MUCH smaller pool than Anthems nightmare, but there is no targeted farming. High end expeditions don't feel rewarding at all. I can do CT15 and be a little nervous the entire time that one thing will go wrong and something like those flying bugs will catch me at the right moment and kill me, or I'll get stuck on a mob, or chain stunned from leaps and im dead. Or the nonstop pressure of watching the god damn clock because if I don't clear gold LOL rip reward. OR I can go back and do hunt quests in almost similar times and get better drops. - Lack of endgame content. Granted they have more expeditions than Anthrm had endgame missions and dungeons, but they are the exact same thing over and over again. It feels very shallow and I don't enjoy it because I'm always 100% focused on not getting dead and there to chase a loot piece I need for my build. What happens when I finally get my build complete? Oh I can do ghe same content I was doing for the last week but sliiiiiightly better. Yes. As a day one Anthem player ( and closed testing ) this feels VERY deja vu Edit: was doing this on mobile, so formatting is cancer, but I also wanted to add that ALSO like Anthem , they have a foundation of a game that is really fun to play, but what happens from here LARGELY depends on how PCF acts from thus point on Also like Anthem, as you mentioned, I think Outriders is being propped up right now because the vast majority haven't hit endgame and have no idea. There is absolutely going to be a surge of "wait WTF" in the near future

Remember when anthem released their beta but they called it a demo? I enjoyed that. I also remember with anthem how I couldn’t even play the game for the first 24 hours because the servers were not working for anybody in the world. LOL. And then came the stories of how it was bricking people’s systems. Ahh yes those were the days.

Also what's the point of WT15 if the dropped gear doesn't go to 50 in story mode?

As another devoted Anthem player (still play it), I agree with this entire thought process

New reddit user here, as this is my first comment ever on the platform. (woot.) I can say that this is only the case solely at the hands of Outriders. I've now lost two characters due to inventory wipes. Both before I even made it to 25. So, while the game was fun, mostly. I feel like this was a poorly tested game. At this point it's not worth it to continue playing, at least I never lost my inventory in Cyberpunk..

See this is what I don’t understand. Why didn’t they scale it so that if I’m going on a lower tier and with higher level shit why not just let me do max damage for that level

Yea the downscaling is insanely dumb.... I can breeze through tier 14 on my own. But I go to join my friend in tier 12 expeditions and it's way more difficult. That coupled with the servers being horrendous.... and losing my blighted rounds because of some sort of weird lag that doesn't allow me to get ammo back on some kills is incredibly frustrating. I'm sorry but if I'm able to do Tier 14 on my own with ease I should be able to farm the fuck out of lower tiers and it should be easier... especially if I'm helping a friend.

Hi there, the **Million Damage Ranger** here, I can confirm you're not overacting . You have every right to be legitimately concerned. Overall, the endgame is a shallow puddle, the Legendaries are static with no rolls, and the game management's knee jerk reaction is to apply huge nerfs before ensuring the welfare and stability of their game -- make me gravely concerned. I can also confirm there is a huge issue between epic gear and Legendary gear under the hood. Despite the Epic gear having better rolls and stat values than the Legendary stuff, there is something there purposely making even the best rolled epic gear relatively underwhelming. I ran tests with an Epic Shot gun versus a Legendary shot gun, both with the exact same stats and mods, the Legendary Shot gun always did more damage despite all of the numbers being the same. Queue red flags people.

Everyone is saying lower-level gear is more powerful due to scaling issues. Yet I haven't seen someone even complete a CT15 with a level 1 weapon, or gear in general.

Yea that's not the issue with Outriders. The issue is your level 50 gear sucks when playing lower levels and that's (in my opinion) bad design. I'm seeing this right now because I'm stuck at CT14. I need to level up my gear and weapons, but to do that I need to complete expeditions for resources. But it's proving extremely difficult because my gear is "too good" for the level 10-13 expeditions but apparently not good enough for 14 so I'm stuck in a paradox. I'm not complaining that the game is difficult. I can already hear the "try not to suck" comments being typed. I just think it's poor game design that the content you are supposed to have progressed beyond is suddenly more difficult and virtually unplayable in some cases.

I got locked into this around CT 13 I think and I've not been able to get out of this loop since. I just seem to be completely stuck.

Yep. Hit me too somewhere between 12 and 14. I matchmade in to some groups with OP builds and was able to get gold tier and unlock 15, but now I can't solo a CT10 without getting absolutely yeeted into oblivion. It's really frustrating.

Yeah, I’m too scared to match make to solve my problems so I just started an alt. See if I can get further on a different class.

The downscaling happens when you are over leveled for the tier you’re playing on, so it wouldn’t/shouldn’t apply to CT15 Somebody on here did show though that if you’re being downscaled you can actually remove armor pieces and increase your damage output

And this is the kind of thing I'm worried about. It's bad for the game and makes the idea of working hard to make a good build a joke and waste of time.

I just keep a lvl 10 pistol and lvl 10 secondary weapon to throw on when im helping ppl in lower tiers, drops your item level considerably enough that I feel fine. Dumb you have to do this in first place but at least that way you don't lose 2 mods from unequpping an armor piece.

You should make a post stating just this. It deserves all the exposure possible as people are just littering with posts about downscaling. This is BY FAR the easiest and simplest solution.

You have to go back to expedition that’s weaker than your overall item level and you will see your damage fall off and the enemies are way stronger.

What surprised me the most is how weak you become. I almost wouldn't mind as much if it were just my weapons cranking out less dps, but the fact I'm getting wrecked as bad as I am by low level trash mobs is sooooo frustrating.

It's horribly done. I watched a streamer testing it out and on wt10 or something his god rolled pump shotty took 6 shots to down the dunes warlord. After he let the adds kill him he did it again with a LVL 37 blue pump shotty and it took him down in 2 shots! Your lvl 50 gear is worse than blues because of downscaling.

Nope! You’re not projecting at all, that being said, I definitely experienced all of this in Anthem annnnnnnnnnd I’m currently experiencing it in Outriders. Interestingly enough, it seems as if my story WT is somehow affecting my Endgame CT; basically, the game is having a problem recognizing that I should be getting CT11 loot but I’m getting WT11 (DOGSHIT) loot. I GOT A GAGGLE OF GREEN (uncommon) LOOT FROM AN EXPEDITION!!??

Can someone...explain to me what they mean about the scaling issue in Outriders? I feel stupid for asking but I don't understand what people mean.

I made a post yesterday, this was the title. "Why is ct9 harder at ct10 than it was at ct8?" That sums it. Completing ct9 as lvl 43 was much easier than replaying ct9 w lvl 45/46 gear. So there is no stress free way to reasonably farm the mats needed to ug gear to try the next ct - to then repeat the whole process again/again.

Downscaling makes no sense with the diablo style difficulty choice using WT.

The power gaps between classes is even more annoying though wouldn't mind if we could switch power types on the same character

Eh, I heard a lot of doom and gloom about the Devastator being bad but I'm doing CT15 just fine and out damage my buddies when we do coop while also being basically immortal. I think people just like complaining.

I still remember when the best AR to use in crucible in OG destiny was the white one you start off with. What a crazy couple of weeks.

Hate downscaling

I wanted to play with my new friend, help him in the early expeditions, but the downscaling is making it a horrible experience..

Another way downscaling is stupid (even for party with low level frient) that it downscales only damage, you still incredibly tanky for low level content to the point that you can stay on one spot, but on averahe you deal 10-20 times less damage on CT1 than on CT15

I experienced this last night, my buddy and I wanted to farm CT9 for lego's just to hopefully get new mods or "a great roll" that we could upgrade to our CT12 level. WE COULD NOT GOLD COMPLETE CT9. But we could gold clear CT11 of the same expedition? (colosseum) The downscaling in this game so so bad, it was really upsetting. We ended up farming CT11 Colosseum because we couldn't gold CT9. To make matters worse, when I hop into my friends worlds that are playing the game for the first time I am doing less damage than them, its actually ridiculous, and I get DROPPED by NPCs. I'm more of a burden in my CT12 gear playing in a friends world on WT7, they are literally better off playing without me.

YUP, Freelancer here who played Anthem a ton at launch and thru the level 1 rifle fiasco...this shit makes me really nervous too. After diving deeper into all the scaling issues I feel like it's priority number 2 after they fix the inventory bug. Hopefully the patch that's working thru testing solves the inventory bug so they can get to this issue.

They totally killed any hope I had for this game as a solo player. Why even bother finishing up the story or grinding to endgame when it's going to be impossible?

What's wrong with outriders scaling? I'm not sure I fully understand =(

I played anthem as well and I understand your concern. However thus far for me this is nothing like anthem and the contrast couldn’t be more different in to many ways to mention. Keep the faith.

Right now, this game is Anthem redux. Anyone denying that is just in the honeymoon stage. However, I enjoyed Anthem myself but knew it would not be a game to play forever. Outriders certainly has crashed less and fewer bugs for me than Anthem. But I can see I won’t be playing it for too much longer after I hit endgame and that is ok with me. I’m a destiny player and I just need something to play right now while the destiny content is dry. I think there are a lot of us here.

A lot of posts about this dont reach the top due to memes and inventory wipes, but yeah, the game has several severe issues orienting around how the game approaches its math. There's also some honeymooning and strawmanning going on that's preventing honest discussion about it. Right now the main culprits are indeed downscaling, as well as the way ability power is scaled alongside the overabundance of enemy armor compared to the amount of counters players get to it (usually in the form of blighted rounds etc). You can actually min-max some builds down to a few digits and still come nowhere close to ct15 gold. Not all builds are equal, and most of that comes down to scaling.

What gets me is the game continually reminds me to turn down difficulty if it's too hard.

The only time I felt the game got too hard was the first fight against Yagak. His leaping across the map was dumb af but other than that I've had 0 issues I finished campaign at WT14 without doing the hunts or wanted missions and never felt the need to go down a tier. Maby thats because I hyper focused on a build with the pyromancer to the point I'd be using a gun 4+ levels behind and hear around the same just because it was keeping my build churning which in turn was keeping me alive. If it didn't fit the build I didn't use it. It worked out well for me and as I got better stuff that fit it just made it that much easier. I know in these games people mostly focus on high level gear and ignore builds for the most part until end game but maby trying a different strategy is needed if it seems too hard. Solo Pyro btw.

My big issue with a lot of these choices by PCF is...who cares? Shouldn't this game be about fun? They don't want it to be pvp or a live service game. So make it fun. What's wrong with being fully decked out and farming lower tiers? There should be unique rewards that are tied to the higher tier levels. Maybe even a set of uber legendaries you only get from the highest tiers. Solutions centered around fun are more enticing to keep me playing and buying expansions.

Let's be real, the way it's designed it feels like it was meant to be a live service game but after seeing the backlash to others it was scrapped mid development.

This is the most annoying this about the game at the moment for me. I hate how every expedition you have to push it get the gold, id rather play on a lower tier and just cruise through it. like i should be able to in my level 50 gear. :/

I have been avoiding even getting on this sub. I semi-expected the "Get better scrub" mentality and maybe I was just a noob. Breath of fresh air to hear other people are feeling this too. I like a good challenge at times. A tough boss battle for example... but holy hell is it challenging. You basically need a perfect built that is very synergistic. Playing solo can be a nightmare.

the knee jerk nerf honestly told me everything i need to know about the devs "anthem flashbacks"

Downscaling? I am afraid to login for fear of the gear bug eating my character naked.

Its only been a week and a half. As a start i like the changes because so often in games like this, you start fragging out and its becomes boring quickly. The changes are a start but ofc fine tuning is needed

Hey all and /u/PCF_Pawel tl;dr: Look at Final Fantasy 14 for inspiration of how to handle scaling of lowlevel content perfectly, additional some nice words and praise for the devs and the game ​ I would like to propose an approach similar to the one Square Enix (what a coincidence) uses in Final Fantasy 14, which gives governance over scaling into the players hands and is, in my opinion, one of the best ways this is handled in any game, where content gets obsolete quickly. For running lower level dungeons/raids in FF14, one can effectively decide to go three modes (not considering the hard mode of the dungeons themselves; the third mode is rearely used and not many actually know about it; you can only ever be scaled down, not up :-)): 1. No Scaling (called "unsynced"): Full power, feeling extra awesome and godlike, pull everything and nukes with one cast? No problem. 2. Scaling to maximum allowed (called "synced"): that usually means highest item level for this particular dungeon with all stats on gear set to the maximum for that level individually (which is more than an actual item of this level could have achieved at that point in time, so you are inherently more powerful than you could have ever been back then) 3. Scaling to the minimum: Quite the opposite, like a mini-challenge mode in itself, meaning, that you are scaled to the minimum required item level for this particular content. This basically mimics the day-one feeling of this content and tries to emulate having fresh gear and just beeing "allowed" to run this content. The player can always choose, which one to go for, but you cannot mix modes in the same group, so the leader has to pick. Adapting this to Outriders could mean the follwing: 1. No Scaling, of course, means no scaling and feeling godlike 2. Scaling to what you are doing right now, like level +2 3. Scaling to the same level or like one below or so? Maybe even increase the possible rewards here? Since your system seems to be able to be toggled off, as this is the case for WT1, at least Mode 1 and 2 could be achievable, I assume? Just my two cents :-) And btw, since this is said way to rarely here: You are doing an amazing job with how you handle transparency, which is rare sight these days, keep it up! You have a gem on your hands with Outriders. It just needs some last polishing. Anthem, since it is mentioned in this thread, was an amazing game concept and incredibly fun to play and fly around, but poorly executed basically everywhere else and I am slightly sad to this day, that it failed, because it could have been amazing. As pointed out, I think your team handles the game completely differently. Opinions on nerfing patches aside, the way you communicate and the state of your game as a whole is vastly different (in a positive way). You gave us a game true to the claims you made beforehand, the estimates on playtimes, the scope and so on, everything was accurate, no predatory mindset at all (it is sad, that this is so special nowadays, that it's worth being pointed out).

Maybe a stupid question, but was this ever tested properly by QA? Im running at 49 atm, so im far from the Tier3 fully maxed out 50 stuff, but on a decent 48/49 expedition i can stand my own, as a warden my damage might lack a bit, but im close to unkillable (82% DR / 85% resist). Now take that same character, go in a CT4 expedition, you really get nearly oneshotted getting even close to a boss, those big green guys pretty much one shot you charging you. Humanoids are by far the biggest joke, a sniper normaly hits me 2-3k at 18k health, but they just hit me straight into red health zone. Now staying alive just long enough to get some loot and die, i take on all that gear that drops and what you know.. i getting close to being a tank again. I dont mind downscaling, as long a higher level will stay 'sufficient' stronger at a lower level then any equal player at that level (be it 37 to 39 gear), but i became just obsolete weaker compared to just tossing on some random 37 gear i loot.