How to please both difficulty crowds..?
It seems that there has been a lot of "division" regarding changes to this game's difficulty. I believe I have a solution that will work for the majority of players.
There are two main groups, the "hardcore" players dont want difficulty turned down, but the "casual" players are unable to function in many situations due to difficulty spikes.
The key to this is that casuals and hardcore players tend to consume different content.
When a casual player says the game is too hard, 99% of the time they would be referring to open world activities, they dont typically mess around with menu options to discover things like "challenging" or "heroic" difficulty settings.
And vice versa, when hardcore players say its getting too easy, they typically play challenging or heroic missions, and frequent the dz more than casuals. Maybe Im wrong but most hardcore players I know could care less if control points and other open world PvE content got slightly easier, they just want the option to make the missions more challenging.
TLDR: if you make most open world PvE content easier, casuals will be happier. Content that you can find by just walking around shouldnt be too punishing for new players. I recently switched from xbox to the PTS and I can tell you open world is going in the right direction, firefights make more sense with less damage to players, and the playerbase will grow as a result. But also make sure that upping the difficulty to "challenging" or going after a nasty boss will be enough of a challenge for hardcore players, since most casual players wont even bother to find the diffuculty switch I see no issue taking these nerfs away at high difficulty.
Just my two cents on the dz but it seems motlsy old div1 fans are the ones who actually use the dz at the moment. Wouldnt it make sense for them to have 2/3 occupied dz areas since they make up most of the players in the dz? Also occupued dz still has very low time to kill, its aimed toward div1 vets but I dont think that sits well with most of them. Occupied time to kill should be significantly longer than normalized.
The whole point of normalized was so rpg mechanics dont allow someone to sponge a full clip to the back of their head right? Its good for some but old rpg fans need somewhere to go as well. I think the occupied dz should try to focus more on the rpg mechanics of this game. Even if its only 1/3 of dz areas, the time to kill makes rpg system basically useless, which drives off many players so even in a smaller area it can seem empty.
I dont have stats so idk maybe there's a ton of casuals in the dark zone or heroic, but as a rule of thumb I would try to balance open world and "story" content based on casual players, and challenging/heroic/occupiedDZ content from hardcore players...
The open world is already not very difficult for hardcore players, and heroic is already too difficult for casuals so there is really nothing to lose.