It's late to implementthose overdue changes but anyway you are doing a bold (for Horizons) move into more generally industry standards.I just wanted to point out somethingin regards to the rating offset experience change (which isn't quite on Blight yet, Illyist was a bit misinformed about that, but it'll be there soon, likely tomorrow).
Higher rating characters can still group up with lower ratings and help them get experience. What has changed is they can no longer do this by killing monsters that are ofno danger to them yet are higher rating than the other character(s) in the group. Basically, you must fight something that is a challenge in order to gain experience (for anyone in the group).
Now, for the people that sees this like it's the end of the world, it is not.
Horizons with its completely screwed up experience rule sets and the limited if any reward for effort, and encouraging "one man party" adventures, falls short in attracting and then keeping new people.
Playing any correctly done game you'll notice how the "I can kill mobs 30 levels above me" statements are complete non sense, and likewise being able to even damage them is against even pretty old standards of even single player games like BG2. You did not kill a level 25 mob in BG2 as level 10 anything, period. Nor in other games, else the very concept of being of a lesser or bigger level becomes pointless. Moreover being able to kill or get exp off so grossly different level mobs will abnormally fast level up the character. Ever heard about people complaining that "just" every 5 levels they have to upgrade their weapon? It's a sign that they level so fast due to game short circuits that getting 5 levels are seen as a little issue, much smaller than tossing 5s to get a weapon IV.
Of course once the game will implement standard practices in the ways of dealing with mobs (experience and damage wise etc.) people will just quit it, bored and disgusted.
Why? Because it's a Bad Thing to reset the experience rate of players to sane values (sane = 1, 2 levels a day is more or less as done in other games) but not give them content to spend their time on while killing the mobs for hours to no end, in a seemingly worsening trend (worse because they won't see that redoing the game mechanics is good in the long term but just the immediate less "fun" and speed at levelling up).
Failing giving the content keeps Horizons as just a giant, epicgrinding machine.
Some passionate grinders are ok with it, but the remaining vocal minority of 95% of remaining perspective playersare not [;)] (and they remain that: perspective players: try it, get bored with it, toss it in a week).