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While there are many things that can be said about the mechanics of the new Adaptive EQ I feel the core of the problem is philosophical and not mechanical in nature. This new version of the monthly EQ changes the core of way many (not all) players have played since the game launched.

Story content and everest content has always been meant to provide challenges and rewards equal to those challenges. If a player tried to tackle story content for progression and was unable to be successful that is where the monthly EQ came in. Players could choose one or more difficulties to complete and get rewards to rank up their champs and improve their roster so that they could eventually complete the more challenging permanent content. One of the rewards for improving their roster was that the monthly EQ became easier, they could see and feel the progress each month even if they had not yet made enough progress to complete the permanent content they were still working towards.

I do not know if this philosophy about EQ was intended, just that it was the general feeling and perception that most of the player base has had since the beginning. The new Adaptive EQ breaks this philosophical concept in 2 ways.

Firstly, players are no longer able to obtain a feeling of accomplishment and progress from the monthly EQ. Because Adaptive content will always scale, any progress that is made in the player's roster is met with scaled up challenges. At no point will the EQ give the feeling of "that was easier I have gotten better champs". If a player is stuck on story content and their Adaptive EQ is too challenging, getting the required rewards to progress their account just become either a lot harder or a much longer grind. My mini account just recently hit Thronebreaker. The Classic difficulty for my account is very punishing. On many paths I have only had 1 champ still alive by the time the final boss is down. I had a lot of revives in overflow luckily, but it is going to make getting needed materials to progress much harder. I know for bigger accounts this particular issue isn't as extreme, but the idea behind it is still the same. The top whale accounts will never again be able to feel like they made content easier because their rosters improved as it will always scale to them.

The second way this new system broke a core philosophy is it took away player agency of choice. If a player wanted to play a lower version, for whatever reason, they had the ability to do so in the past. I had not tried the previous Thronebreaker version on my mini account, but last month if the TB version had been too challenging I could have just gone and done the next tier down and had those rewards instead. Now all forms of choice are gone. We get one version, like it or not, and if it is too hard or just harder than we want to play through at the time, too bad.

Either one of these changes would feel bad, but the two changes together just feel horrible. I feel like these feelings are what are actually driving a lot of the emotion behind what has happened.

I do not like to point out problems without proposing a solution when I can, and I think I have one that could in effect keep Adaptive around but in a way that actually makes more sense and does not break the original philosophy behind EQ.

Keep both the new Classic and Elder formats with the following changes:
Classic -
Tier 1 of any difficulty gives the same base rewards that the non-adaptive versions gave for that progression difficulty. Players can choose which progression difficulty they want to complete, and whatever version they complete they will also get all the rewards from previous progression difficulty. If they then choose to do a harder progression then they would only get the rewards for that version as they already had the previous versions' rewards.
Keep the tiers, and let players choose which tier they want to try of any given progression difficulty. If they feel tier 1 is too easy and want to try tier 2 (or higher) for better rewards like the tiers have now, great, but this allows it to be the players choice instead of something that is forced upon them.
Elder -
Should not require Classic completion, open automatically.
Completing Elder would also give Classic rewards (if they had not already been earned).
Tier 1 should be the same difficulty and rewards as the first version of the Valiant EQ.
Similar to Classic, if players find it too easy or simply want more/better rewards, allow the player to choose a higher tier and go for those rewards.


Non-philosophical problems with the new Adaptive and some ideas. (Most of these I have seen in various threads, just putting them all in one spot)
Prestige is the top 30 of your roster, but does not give any indication of the breadth of classes or champs that make up that number. So when difficulty is scaled and Elder requires very specific champs with limitations they are likely not to be met. While very unlikely, someone could have a roster that has few to no high level mutants, and then they would have no chance at the mutant path with the way this version is scaling.
Crucible style content should have healing when switching. Even if the difficulty wasn't as hard as it is on these scales, to be expected to go that many fights with 1 health bar basically (without going crazy on revives/potions) and not to even get rewards like crucible is kind of crazy.
Most new champs do not work like older ones do, however these nodes are designed for older champs. Many nodes need to be redesigned for this style of content to work with newer champs, as those are the ones most people rank and their prestige is based upon.
If it is going to be crucible style 1 and done fights without synergies, then champion that need multiple fights to ramp up should have the same benefits they have in Battlegrounds.


While I am very disappointed with what was released this week, I do not want to give up hope on this game yet. I have spent too many years and too much money to just walk away without at least trying to help improve the situation if at all possible.

A lot of people have given feedback on adaptive difficulty. There are a few people that like it, a few more at least have no problem with it, and a lot of people don't like it. There are a lot of reasons why: fight lengths, fight difficulty, narrow roster checking, relative reward value. Now that I've had a chance to both see it and think about it, plus discuss it with others, I think there's a fundamental problem with Adaptive difficulty that no amount of tweaking alone will solve. It is a problem that no matter who you listen to, and no matter who you try to please, will still break it for everyone else. And the problem, in effect, is us. We as a player base are wildly diverse in player strength, not to mention our approaches to the game, our tolerance for difficulty, our time availability. We are thousands and thousands of different people with different skills, knowledge, money and time.

But there's only one Adaptive difficulty.

The idea of adaptive difficulty is to eliminate difficulty tiers, and instead have a monthly EQ that can grow with you. You get stronger, it gets stronger. You move up, your rewards move up. Whether they hit the target correctly, in theory that's great. The problem is there is no target to hit. If there exists a player twice as skilled as me (and there are) there is no difficulty you can design into Adaptive EQ that will properly challenge us both. I can eventually have the same roster, but I will never have the same skill. Or maybe I'm a casual player will less time. I am not likely to grow into a player with more time. Or maybe I'm a casual player that doesn't want to stress on content. I'm not likely to grow into someone that does.

There has always been a choice. Just because you're Uncollected, doesn't mean you have to do UC EQ. You can do lower tiers if you want. You can pick your difficulty level. You will get less rewards, but that's your choice. You can choose to play the game casually if you want. You can choose lower difficulty if you just aren't that good. Remember, almost half the players in this game are below average. If Adaptive difficulty targets the average player, that means half the players can no longer do monthly EQ. And that's a problem.

When I did my Act 6 difficulty analysis, there was a central point to all of it. The point was that things like Labyrinth, Abyss, Eternity of Pain, can be whatever difficulty the devs set. Whether its hard for the top 20% or top 10% or top 1% is a matter of design choice. But the story arcs were, and still mostly are, the main progression path to the game. They can't be balanced around what the top 20% can do, because that leaves the bottom 80% nowhere to go. Now, you do have some leeway with story Arcs: if you aim for the average player, below average players could try to "outlevel" it. They can grow much stronger than the average player gets before tackling it, to level the playing field. This has limits, but it can happen, and you don't have to aim for the very bottom of the playerbase as a result.

But you can't outlevel Adaptive EQ. Its designed to grow with you, so you can't make it easier by growing stronger. It will grow stronger with you. If you can't do it now, you might never be able to do it no matter how much you progress or how strong you build your roster.

What happens to the bottom 25% of the playerbase? What happens to the bottom 10% of the playerbase? I'm perfectly fine telling them they might never do the Grandmaster's Gauntlet. But monthly EQ *has* to be accessible to everyone. It is a central part of the game.

Maybe elder is too hard. Maybe classic needs more rewards. But none of that will matter if most of the playerbase can't do monthly EQ, because I doubt they'll stick around. But we also can't make Adaptive so easy that 90% of the players sleep walk through it with mediocre rewards. Really, we need difficulty modes.

We need an adaptive difficulty that asks the player: so, who are you? Are you MSD? Okay, here you go. Are you an average player? Here's your difficulty. Are you just looking to cruise casually? Well, we will let you do that also. We need something that can be fast, can be easy, can be simple to do. Its fine if it is harder and more rewarding for the players who can and want to do that. But while it is great that Adaptive scales with roster strength, that grows with me as I grow, we also need Adaptive to scale with the player. We have different tiers of roster. We also have different tiers of player. Adaptive needs to include as many of them as possible. Adaptive should grow with the player, but it needs to first know who that player is.

Whatever else happens, in my opinion if Adaptive doesn't scale with player, it is going to be a very serious long term problem for the game. No reward buff fixes this. No difficulty tweak fixes this.

Adaptive scales with roster. It must also scale with our players.

Everything else is tuning. But in my opinion, this is fundamental.