One of the things that comes up in the discussions about why OOO is failing SK has to do with noob vs veteran pandering, and right now OOO is pandering to the noods at the expense of the veterans by nerfing the stuffing out of everything. And I respect that they have to do this, because they do need to expand the playerbase and they can't do that if the game is initially unplayable. Of course, if there's no replay value, people will quit as well.

So the idea is that if you suck and keep getting hit, the game nerfs itself, and if you dodge everything, the game buffs itself. This "rating" is revaluated at the end of each level. This would affect the cr/heat/mat payout about halfway (so if you are rated at 110% of average, you get 105% average yeild. Of course, if you run at 80% this means you get 90% yeild.)
The change in difficulty would be limited in range on both sides, because if you're a person who can dodge all of the bullets from 12 turrets in an arena, you don't want to have the monsters buffed to the point where it takes a dozen combos to kill a knocker and if you do slip up and get hit by a glop drop you die. Likewise, you can't just kill yourself to the point where there is no difficulty. I'm not sure what these endpoints should be but I estimate 70%-170%

Increases in difficulty come from reduced monster windup/telegraphing, increased monster attack power, and increased monster health. I think windup and attack should scale below the knight's rating and monster health should scale way above the knight's rating. So a knight with a rating of 110%would have monsters with a rating of 130% or something. Reduction of difficulty is the reverse.

Evaluation of the rating comes from the damage taken and the minimum health reached. The idea is that if you only take damage occasionally and on purpose (like letting down your shield to kill something) and heal inbetween those times, your mimimun health never gets that low, even though you may lose as much health as a noob who doesn't know about damage types or shielding.
Also, it would be dependant on your gear. So running around t1 in skolver will make the difficulty go much faster than in proto.

For parties, I was thinking of doing the second lowest member's rating. This way a noob who tags along with a really good group will have to struggle to not die, while an expert who leads a group of noobs will have a much easier time to conpensate for all their teammeates dying. For two-party groups it would be the average.

Of course, how would the ratings change for parties? would it be a temporary change that only applies for the party? Would there be a permant change, but much smaller?
And should the ratings be public? I don't think so. What would happen is veterans would refuse to associate with noobs and while that doesn't sound so bad then the noobs can't learn, and they would be stuck as noobs forever.

Yes, and all the numbers probably should be tweaked a bit. Thoughts?