I've been trying to see if there's a way to essentially better translate desktop scaling levels to a web service. I have a project that I'm supporting and, while you can zoom in or out on the .mxd side at most any scale, the most I've been able to find as far as scale references for the server-side is that, whatever you set, it increases/decreases by a factor of 2 (500,000 -> 1,000,000 as an oversimplified example) and if you want to scroll to 750,000 or something in between, it'll go to the nearest factor of 2 instead.
As a console output example from the service side:
