Hey gents, I'd like to bring up a little discussion about Difficulty scaling in Destiny and how it'll relate to the shared-world play we're all so looking forward to. I was digging through the various Destiny threads, paying close attention to the gear/comptetitive sections, when I kept coming across that character screen from the preview video released on the 17th. Now a lot of people focused on the four promised stats displayed at the bottom. (Energy, Shields, Discipline, and Agility) But what more interested me was the number in the upper left. Now I, like many others, have come to believe this is a method of gearscoring players as they accumulate loot/skills. However, whereas most people concern themselves with the crossovers between Co-op and competitive balancing, I'm myself curious if this number will come into play when deciding the encounter strength for the individual player or the player group. Think about it. Destiny is a practically menu-less game that will stress drop-in/drop-out co-op. Where in this model is there room for the standard teired difficulty settings we've come to know and love from Halo single-player? The answer? There isn't. This is all theory, but I believe the gear card # shown in the preview video will not only come into play when/if competitive multiplayer allows use of co-op equipment, but will also define how hard encounters are in the co-op world. Take for example, 3 guardians in a group assaulting a Cabal stronghold on mars. They have the following gearscore stats: 1487 1756 2181 I believe the system will average these numbers out and scale the difficulty accordingly (Health/damage of enemies, # of enemies, dynamics), adjusting as players leave/join the instance of the encounter. Thoughts? Comments? Theories?