Quote Originally Posted by Hyrist View Post
It may not have been your intention, but it's reflected in your mannerism. You might not think of yourself as one, but you likely are an above-average player. The fact that you don't consiter yourself one is probably where you get a lot of the differences you get in opinions with other players - you keep viewing yourself as the average level when all that trial and error in gaming has increased your ability to do better in games in general. - Just as an observation.
Interesting observation, then.

But you bring up an interesting issue that the game ramps UP it's contexual difficulty as you play.

Let's break this back down into the two categories I've mentioned before. AI, and Stats.

In the games with a downward difficulty scaling, as you mention. Often times what is happening is that the AI is increasing, but the player's raw stats are sky-rocking to the point where even if the AI is more complex, they can just bully their way through it.

In DS, the AI improves, but the stats also skyrocket to surpass even the player's stat scaling. What this does is force the player to step up their game (The equivilant of the Game's AI). Sadly, this often just leads to the player finding the nearest, easiest exploit.

So, given the context to this, would you reccomend that SE adopt the policy of having their stat scaling curve upwards sharply for their monsters? I can see some of the attraction in this, particularly in something niche like epic world bosses, but ultimately I feel as if this sort of scaling should be best reserved outside of the main storyline.
I certainly would recommend such a policy, not only because of the increased difficulty but it would be the easiest policy to implement for now. We even already have it available in the form of the Guildleve system (though granted, they still need more improvements, but still a good start).

And if you were to ask me, there is a particularly dynamic AI I'd like to see Square Enix take a page from, which was Bethesda's own creation. Before TES4:Oblivion came out, Bethesda had managed to create a virtually "too perfect" AI in it where the NPCs were truly alive without the player being there, and they had to cut one of their major previews short because it worked too well: various NPCs were actually stealing from one-another and the guard NPCs would kill them, and other NPCs murdered one-another, all without the "player interaction". Now I'm not saying the same should be done here, but I think it'd be nice for Square Enix to adapt.