I guess their data showed too many people stopped playing.

Starhenge Difficulty & Reward Changes

We initially made our changes to Starhenge to make it more challenging and more engaging for users alongside an increase of rewards. With the intent of higher difficulty equals higher rewards, we overshot our mark—especially for easy, normal, and hard difficulties. Your feedback and data both showed too big of a hurdle between users and the content.

The lesson we have learned from this Starhenge patch is that we should not put hurdles in front of your current playstyle. In response to this we are bringing down the requirements for all 4 difficulties, deleting the shield gauge that was added, and decreasing monster’s attack/moving speed.

If you were to compare it to v153 (before the v202 update), then you will see Easy, Normal, and Hard back to similar difficulty levels – while Insane mode will still land a bit higher than before.