Quote Originally Posted by Jojoya View Post
The development team, of course. They can see actual player performance. They can tell at what point increasing numbers of players start having trouble progressing.

All we have as players is anecdotal evidence of what the player base as a whole is capable of, and it's natural for us to tend to end up surrounded by others of roughly the same skill level.

Leave it to the developers to make the decision if difficulty should be increased. They know what their goals are for the game and what they want the base difficulty to be.
Then by going by the trends I worry about the future when things like mitigation can be considered "tryhard" to many, lol.