Tiered Events --

FaustianDeal

So there was a time when they would run 2 versions of a particular event side-by-side with one flavor being a 'regular' and the other being a 'hard'. (PVE simulator kind of does this.) I think there are 2 issues here that set up a missed opportunity:
1 - The current structure allows people to enter and compete in both difficulty tiers.
2 - Scaling attempts to says the normal one is 'relatively' normal and the hard is also relatively so

What if: instead of the the status quo (people can enter both difficulties, and difficulties try to dynamically scale to allow fairness)
we attempted to let people self-select into a difficulty band - and the higher difficulty bands had better prizes.

What if the difficulty bands were more fixed and we were only allowed to enter one tier at a time? The prizes for the harder tiers would be nominally 'better' because the players who were able to qualify for entering that band had the roster required to get in the door. I would see some kind of slight overlap in the prize structure so that the winner of a 'B' difficulty level gets a better prize than someone who came in last in the 'A' group, but the top the prize awarded for the 50th percentile in the 'A' group was equivalent to the 'B' groups top prize, and the quality went up from there.

The overlap in the prize tiers probably needs to be smaller than 50% otherwise everyone will lowball their entry points... maybe overlapping just a third or a quarter of the prizes could make more sense. We want to discourage sand-baggers who go down a group and mop up, and also encourage stretch-play from time to time where someone is incented to try to punch above their class and go big.

This seems like it could help balance the risk/reward trade-off that we are constantly seeking to optimize. (Why try to level the playing field between a 2* player and an established 3* player - people in those groups have different goals and are working toward different rewards.)

Another option could restrict players based on total team stars. A heavy-weight division that would allow up to 12 total stars, all the way down to a fly-weight division that restricted you to 3-4 total stars across your whole team. (Could we even elect to go with X-Force alone as an 'army of one' in the '4-star total' band?)