There are many complaints about the difficulty and I think there's a simple way it could be solved.

I think the difficulty options should be lain out like this:

Your damage to Others: From 1\6 to 6x.
Enemy damage to you: 1\6 to 6x.
Others damage to others: 1/6 to 6x.

hardcoe mode: On/Off

You would be able to open the hardcoe tab and choose which options in particular to choose, eg, arrows have weight, all potions heal over time etc.

Thoughts?

It's another artificial attempt at increasing the diffulty. Decrease player damage/ increase enemy damage. How about smarter opponents? Higher level baddies? Larger groups of enemies?

Simply increasing/decreasing damage feels like a copout to me.

Well, the obvious point would be that changing damage doesn't affect how much memory etc. the game takes to run, which all of the others (other than higher level baddies, which is kind of what the OP was suggesting) do.

This is something that can be just patched into the game however, unlike a complete AI overhaul.

Isn't that the way the levels are scaled now?

A plain ol' bandit has 1000hp and you do 10dmg! Now that's what I call Master difficulty.

MGS4 raised AI intelligence and the amount of damage you took for every level in difficulty that you went up. That should be the way to look at it. On the same note, damage taken and damage dealt should be pretty equal. Otherwise, it's the same damned thing.

EDIT: And to respond to the post above me; It wouldn't be that difficult. It wouldn't be an entire overhaul. You just need to take the current code and tweak it in a way (for every level of difficulty) that a given enemy becomes more vicious and unrelenting in combat, has a further field of view, their ears are more sensitive, has higher stamina and his health scales to your 400hp.

Oh hey! That's a great idea. Instead of having relatively abstract notions like "novice, apprentice, adept, expert, master", have an option to set your own damage:mitigation ratio. That would be awesome way to handle difficulty. .

The difficulty is F*d up because some enemies are as powerful as 30 other enemies of the same faction. A bandit leader can be 30 times as hard as a normal bandit, in the same dungeon. Just increase the difficulty of those extremely weak enemies and perhpas re-balance NPC magic use on you and the difficulty would be fine. (after all these balance things have been done, you could introduce a new difficulty level: "Dragonborn" that is harder than master. Otherwise it'd mean you one hit kill bandits and they 10 hit kill you, while mages will one hit kill you and some misc randomer enemies will one hit kill you as well.

Yeah, first fix the whacked boss scaling then start applying various buffs, or some of them will be unbeatable at higher settings. One thing they could do is increase the quality of NPCs' gear, so that by the time we're fighting L50 opposition they have Legendary weapons of their chosen material instead of crappy standard ones, since the latter barely do anything to the 500+ HP characters often have by then. That. and give them the weapon and block perks relevant to their fighting styles (spell buff perks for mages), so that 1) all that 'excess' armor rating we're often toting around is actually useful, and 2) trying to just hack away will see our attacks thrown back in our faces if we're not careful.