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If you’ve been playing Outriders, particularly its Challenge Tier-based endgame, you might have run into the following situation. 
 
Say you’ve managed to get up to Challenge Tier 14. But your friend is at Challenge Tier 10. You hop into a game with him, thinking you’ll be able to help him blow through his Expedition, only somehow you find that your build feels…worse than at Tier 14? 
Your damage is lower, enemies are hitting harder. What exactly is going on here? 
It’s called downscaling. Many games do it, but Outriders does it particularly poorly, and it needs to be dramatically reduced or removed. 
 
What’s going on here is that if you get “too far ahead” of lower Challenge or World Tiers, your stats are essentially nerfed to compensate for that, which creates situations where it feels like you’re doing less damage and taking more than at your “proper” level. 
 
Outriders appears to only let you be at most, two “levels” ahead of enemies, and any more than that and downscaling starts to kick in to a degree. It’s not consistent, so sometimes you could feel strong in a certain situation, but other times it will be like your build is doing nothing, and you’re underperforming higher tiers. 
 
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It’s not just downscaling that’s a problem. Enemy upscaling is bad too, because the game changes difficulty based on your potential max item power. That’s why when you graduate from one Challenge Tier to another, it will feel like your build goes from great to trash almost instantly, because you instantly need to upgrade everything you have another level or two. 
Then there’s the problem of enemy scaling in multiplayer, where your build that works great in solo play is destroyed when 1 or 2 more people join the game and enemies suddenly seem to have 5x as much health. 
In short, scaling, both up and down, is a problem, though it’s downscaling that feels the worst because of how illogical it is, ie. players with powerful builds should be expecting to steamroll lower tiers, and the game purposefully prevents this from happening. 
At the very least, the gap needs to be wider. You should be allowed to feel power at like, five levels above an enemy, not only be capped to two. Destiny ran into this problem at one point where the “floor” for enemies was low, so they extended it by a wide margin so players could feel more powerful. Outriders has these wild swings where you go from feeling powerful to trash and back again over the course of just a couple world tiers and it feels unpleasant when this happens, and hurts co-op play with friends. 
The campaign is much smoother, mostly because you are playing that solo, and you can change World Tier on a whim if a particular room of enemies is just too tough. But in Expeditions this is a much more pronounced problem and needs to be addressed pretty quickly here. 
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If you’ve been playing Outriders, particularly its Challenge Tier-based endgame, you might have run into the following situation.

Outriders’ Downscaling Is Why Your Damage Feels So Weird, And It Needs To Go