Am I doing something wrong or is level scaling completely bugged?

Right now I'm attempting to make a 5-10 story arc, and while the actual arc seems to be working okay, playing it is needlessly difficult because there seems to be an oversight with the level scaling feature.

Basically, by setting the mission to 5-10, it will spawn enemies at level 10, which makes sense. However, the AE will also exemplar my character down to level 9 for some unknown reason, and that also causes the NPC allies to spawn off that level as well.

What this boils down to is that a natural level 10 trying to do the arc will have a far harder time than they should, and it's enough of a difficulty spike for that level range that I'm forced to not officially release this arc.

Is there some way to fix this, or do I have to start sending PMs around begging for it to be fixed?

What are the difficulty settings of the character you are testing it with? I've found that with AE, if you change your rep, you don't change the levels of the enemies if they have a specific cap (like Skulls and Hellions cap at 10 and Vahz cap at 20), but rather you just exemp lower. So if your testing character is set to fight +1 enemies and the mob you are fighting caps at level 10, you will be lowered instead of them being raised, because they don't exist at the higher level.

Hrm, it might be possible that the difficulty sliders were turned up for who I was testing with, but unlikely. I'll have to go recheck, I guess. In this case it wouldn't be because they don't exist at level 11 (I was using Legacy Chain), but solely because the mission was capped at 10.

Edit: But apparently not too unlikely. Playing the arc solo results in everything working as intended. I'll be sure to give my testing partner such a pinch. Thanks for the help, Jay!