Increase the maximum level differences of the players we can join. Increasing to at least 10 levels( Make it have a toggle so we can turn off and on) would be cool. Its nice to run into players that are actually grinding and want to advance.

When you made the changes to quest exp and map difficulty i think it was just a bit too much of a change to quest exp. I would do what you did before, but scale it back 25-50% on quest exp reduction.