My issue with Adaptive difficulty
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.
