Sure, I wonder how many combats I do in a campaign without rushing it. 54 (3*18) looks already like a lot and very very late in a campaign when I need my 3 teams a long time before. I suspect I’ll just adapt to one team, two fake teams, reload, to minimize the grinding. Which could as well lead me to difficulty disgusting me because too easy. 
A lot of things is possible, think the team will test tune everything well is more a dream.
I just created a little DLL to update two method calls (rewards following won mission, level up), and started a new game (it’s not on Nexus).
After a few hours, I can say it’s a serious nerf to training centers and a big incentive to always send the same soldiers into battle.
I quickly found the group of 8 soldiers I wanted and use only them.
Ambushes now bring a reward (+10 SP). I ignored scavenging sites until I got my team of 8.
The only level 7 I have came through training centers and are clearly the equivalent of level 3-4 soldiers (but you have the choice in the perks you choose).
Grinding ? Yes you can, but you usually have already lots of missions in a normal playthrough.
I bet my initial heavy, sniper and the assault I kept have done more than 18 missions already and will soon look pretty über.
It may be good to introduce some diminishing returns. After 20 missions, only 5 SP or even 1 SP to force using common SP pool (that shouldn’t exist to force choices on the player’s part).
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It’s worth taking into account that with the other balance changes in the coming patch to dynamic difficulty, constantly doing well in missions will not be nearly as punishing (especially on easier difficulties). So this will make scavenging missions more attractive and viable too.
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The common pool is a part of a design approach totally different, that myself I appreciate, but many players complain about it.
The point is to play mostly the whole campaign with high level soldiers, not just a short part of the campaign that is the final parts of the campaign. The global pool give some extra reward and some extra soldiers improvement without changing much this design goal.
There’s still improvements as campaign progress but you get the max complexity (or the max op holes, joke) rather soon in the campaign.
This should change Easy/Normal, now the question is if it’s time or POI that will ensure more scaling. POI won’t work at Easy/Normal without changes because it is highly controllable and time will hardly be intuitive with a POI shown.
For me the game could use two auto scaling, up and down, with different setup adapted to difficulty levels.
multiple training facility
I wish training centre works like a real training, a training camp just like their real combat but in virtual. Squad HP will be fully replenish once their training is done (failed or successful), perhaps it’s affecting their stamina. So their virtual training combat it has enemy wave similar to ambush mission with some specific mission for it. Let’s say no place for lazy soldier, forcing player to train their squad for gain an XP-SP. Upgrading the facility will gain more XP-SP 
.
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The game already scales down. The problem is, most players won’t accept a loss. If they lose a mission or lose a soldier, they reload the game until try again until they have a successful mission. All this then does is increase the difficulty more.
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Soldier training is hardly lazy activity. 
I didn’t explained well enough or with enough details. I’m aware of such problem. My comment was related to difficulty going quickly up AND down with the auto scaling, the down scaling are weird too at Easy. For some players it is as much a problem even at Legend. I can’t say myself because with my play at Legend, no death is accepted, and injuries seem have a slower effect.
That a disaster makes the game suddenly easy, is not fitting Legend in my opinion, this is an opinion. But I suspect that when the game will reach a final state it won’t be a minor point anymore.
That the fast scale down are also a problem is another opinion.
And then last opinion is scale down speed needs a tuning adapted to difficulty level, but yeah scale up too but they target different aspects of the auto scaling.
Both changes will certainly make doing missions more attractive for gaining SPs and resources, but without proper Pandoran evolution they will not be any more interesting to play in the late game. Unfortunately right now at some point the battles become a chore, devoid of any challenge because the enemy never learns how to counter the player’s game style.
Eventually the grinding will justify them during those periods where nothing happen.
The problem is aggravated because most players let most scavenging missions not done. And sometimes try do some later in campaign. But if soldiers rise up push make most of them, later campaign won’t spawn/have many.
Still, when enemies are scaled up, scavenging rewards should scale up.
Yes something like that. A lot of people have specific bases just with training centres and medical facilities solely for recuperating and training. Drop a soldier there and a few days later they’re ubersoldat.
I would say good thing. I’m glad that they introduce such changes.
Where can you see what most players are doing? I thought only Snapshot had data on that.
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It’s also worth remembering that we have a lot of changes for this next patch (and even more further down the road). We spend time testing these changes collectively, and fine tuning them to work well with one another (this is why these patches take more time, and why modders can make changes to individual things more quickly).
For this reason, you shouldn’t judge the individual changes in isolation, as a single change which may make little sense on its own, should hopefully make more sense in the bigger picture.
A number of things added in Blood and Titanium (both in the paid DLC and the free content update) required us to rebalance some existing numbers too - this is why it’s all happening at the same time.
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UV, do you have any information about ironman mode with DLC1?