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I think in general, the Writing Directors have been uncertain as to how fast PCs would advance in levels (and it does vary markedly by player), and how to develop a strategy for unfolding a plot or series of plots (story arcs) in LFR. There was not a lot of upfront guidance.

In discussing story arcs for Waterdeep with our fellow regional admins, one pointed out that if we recommended to players a "prequel," with the replay rules, a gamer could elect to replay that adventure with a new character who would be able to progress through a tighter story arc, than was possible to present at the start of the campaign. It is not a perfect solution, but it seems like a useful approach.

Given the limited number of regional adventures (7 the first year, 5 after that, assuming you get your bonus adventure) and the adventure's shelf life (year one adventures will retire in Dec 2011), that will be a slow rate of advancement to play in only one region, assuming we stuck to low level adventures.

Keith

I want more enemies.

Or more precisely, I want less APL +4 enemies, less paragon enemies in heroic, and more numbers of lower level enemies in general.

APL +4 enemies versus APL -1 parties (i.e. level 1s playing low in 1-4 mods, or a party of 11s just entering paragon) take the typical nominal 50% hit rate and turn it into 75% for the enemy hitting the PCs and 25% for the PCs hitting the enemy. Leader bonuses to offset this often require hits (making them unreliable, and even more so when the target is very hard to hit), the same for debuffs. A less than optimized character or one with a bad matchup of attacks/defenses can end up facing 5-15% hit rates and 85-95% rates of being hit; occassionally we even see monster leader/controller support working to tip the balance in that fashion. If a sub-optimal character is facing 5% hit rates and an optimal character is facing 20% hit rates (we'll say the difference is 16 vs 20 starting attack stat and the op char has expertise pre level 15) then at a first glance the op character is being 4 times as effective! Isn't that kind of the opposite of what we want in LFR?

Paragon PCs have a huge jump in effectiveness and so do paragon monsters. There is a slight balancing effect on monsters in that many have raised vulnerabilities. So many things like ongoing damage, resistances, etc. jump by 5 points between level 10 and level 11. But PCs have a number of features that scale up substancially at paragon, gain access to substantially better feats, multiple paragon path features at 11, a bump to all attributes, etc. Throwing in level 13 elites at level 7-10 does a lot to highlight the discrepancy, even if you down-level the paragon monster (as downleveling doesn't change a lot of what makes it a paragon monster).

If players skip the PHB2 feats for accuracy and defenses, there is about a 4 point difference in growth between PCs and monsters from level 1-30. At the same time, most characters gain in their ability to engage larger numbers of enemies. So slowly dropping the relative level of monsters from say level +2 to level -2, while accordingly doubling their numbers keeps the attacks/defenses on par while making for more epic fights. The authors need to decide whether to target char op'd characters for difficulty or more general characters. The arms race will lead to only min-max'd characters being able to succeed at higher levels, while aiming to challenge less optimized builds will duly punish the min-maxing players by depriving them of a challenge. This can help keep expertise and the epic defenses feats from becoming a feat tax.

Agreed, most authors/admins that are on the Forums also watch this thread.

Regarding more combats with many foes, that works spectacularly well for low-threat or at-level threat encounters. It is more difficult to create a harder combat with many lower level foes, or to borrow the XP from other fights for this one to still challenge. Lower defenses, lower attacks, lower HPs... it can work, don't get me wrong, but it is harder to make it work without being dependant on cheese. I mean, the most typical encounter I see with many monsters includes a bunch of guard drakes (curse you,  guard drakes!).

As mods reach higher levels, there are more monsters with more synergies and that might make it easier to have encounters with many foes.

I'm sure a number of the authors will consider that a fun challenge to build.