I don’t think ANYONE bought the game to hold their hand, and tell them how good they are. You say you bought it for a challenge…that’s what difficulty levels are for, and they worked beautifully. I play solo on adventure. This provided enough resistance to be challenging, while not overwhelming, so i could focus on the game’s story.
Right now, there’s no discernible difference between difficulty levels, that i can see. i’m watching people playing on harder difficulty levels, and their experiences are mirroring my own. arty spam, gas spam, overwhelming numbers of enemies appearing from seemingly nowhere, shooting through walls, melee through walls, outright clipping through walls, and fragging you from inside the building you’re in, enemies disappearing, and reappearing in different places, enemies being able to see you from impossible distances, and IMMEDIATELY going red, alerting every machine in a square kilometer to your location… It’s insanity.
Right now, it’s damn near impossible to get anything done in terms of story and missions, because i end up spending most of my time, stuck on the 2nd floor of a house, or in a church tower, getting pounded to hell, by an absolutely ludicrous number of machines, and often i can’t even go downstairs because a bunch of the have either clipped into the building, or outright spawned in the building. Oh, and let’s not forget about how safehouses aren’t safe anymore. They can attack you in safehouses, they can actually walk right up to, and into safehouses. No, this is nuts. I didn’t buy this game to be frustrating, i bought it to be fun. I’ve only been playing for a couple of weeks, and right up until this update, i was having a lot of fun with it. Now, not so much.
And as to your solution to “run like hell”… have you honestly tried to run from a hunter? They run stupid fast, and have unlimited stamina. if you’re a relatively new player, and haven’t had a chance to upgrade your stamina, you’re screwed.