i play on auric damnation, and, tbh, i haven’t noticed any under-levelled players in a very long time. i actually can’t even remember any times where a -30 player was in the lobby. there are bad players, sure, but having prestige levels and whatever isn’t going to prevent you from having a bad game. getting good teams is rng.
you’ve got potentially thousands of players queuing up for auric stuff, and not all of them are going to be playing at their best every single game. we all have bad games/days, and a player having 1000+ hours and another one only having maybe 40-50 can be indistinguishable at times. just because someone’s played longer doesn’t mean they’re better. some people just suck, and will always suck.
i really don’t think this ’s a problem on auric. maybe from malice to damnation, but auric stuff has always been pretty consistent with decent level 30+ players from my experience. i also think the difficulty is pretty good where it is now, too, where there’s enough challenge where it feels satisfying when/if you make it out of a tight spot. sometimes it feels like maybe you were cheated out of it for whatever reason, but that’s how it goes in all games. i’m sure if you could go back and change the way you played just a few second leading up to your death, you could probably choose to do something differently that would have saved the mission. that’s where skill comes in, though. everyone makes mistakes. the threat of failure is why videogames are fun to begin with.