My first instinct to adaptive difficulty, is a hard no, or at least a please keep it optional.

I’m someone who plays a lot of Fifa.  That game heavily emphasizes adaptive difficulty.

Simplifying a little bit, the way difficulty works in that game is:  every time you score, the difficulty level goes up.  If your opponent scores the difficulty goes down.  If you have the ball a lot the difficulty goes up, and if the other team has the ball most of the game the difficulty goes down.   There are also a few other things, like, if you score in the first few minutes that raises difficulty as well.

If your team starts with the ball, and you then make a long run of play to score, say you have an excellent drive with tons of passes, and after about 10 in-game minutes of great play on your part, you score a goal.  You’re celebrating, your team is celebrating, it’s great fun!

In the background, though, suddenly the difficulty is much, much higher than the setting you picked.   After all you’ve had the ball for the entirety of the game, so far.   You’re ahead, and you had the audacity to score early.  Now suddenly, instead of playing on easy, the game has moved you up to hard.

Remember, this is not an excellent player, but rather someone who knows very little about the sport, and is just having fun playing with his favorite team.

Now suddenly facing a hard difficulty computer, it’s almost impossible for the player to steal the ball, and the other team scores, almost instantly.  The game is now tied, and the difficulty goes down from hard to normal – that’s one level higher than our man’s preferred difficulty.

So what does he do?  Well, he’s a rational human being, he knows he’s not the best player, so he decides he’s going to play it safe, and take very few risks.  Remember, in his eyes, the computer is extremely good at attacking.  They scored in a few seconds, while it took him several minutes.

Doing this, he manages to keep the ball, and maybe takes one or two shots that are almost certain not to turn out badly for him.  As a result he now has extremely high time of possession, so yep, you guessed it, the difficulty is now set to hard mode!  The computers steal the ball from him and score almost instantly, and now our man is losing.  The difficulty goes back down to normal, and he has the ball again. He takes some risks that fail.  Remember, normal is very hard for him, and the game ends with him losing probably by 2 or more goals.

To counter this, what good players do, and what almost every guide on the internet tells you to do, is to build the entirety of your team around counter attacking.  That way your team almost never has the ball.

Scoring makes the game harder, but you never have the ball, so that lowers the difficulty. Doing this makes the difficulty manageable.

I really don’t like adaptive difficulty, because it punishes you for short moments of brilliant play.

I don’t know what the correct solution to the difficulty problem is, because I do 100% agree with you:  snowballing is a major problem in this genre.  Maybe Amplitude can implement adaptive difficulty better than EA.

SunshineWings wrote:

From the current beta, it's obvious that snowballing is inevitable. For a good player that does well in previous eras, later eras don't matter a lot, since numbers just grow exponentially,

*** Well I cant leave the quote window for some reason BUG in the forum, but I was going to say dont kill the game before launch LOL noooooo

Owlexander wrote:
I really don’t like adaptive difficulty, because it punishes you for short moments of brilliant play.

So I propose to use achievement for incentive, wining the game is no longer a good incentive in dynamic difficulty setting.

SunshineWings wrote:

Owlexander wrote:
I really don’t like adaptive difficulty, because it punishes you for short moments of brilliant play.

So I propose to use achievement for incentive, wining the game is no longer a good incentive in dynamic difficulty setting.

So I got all achievements, what's next? Where's your incentive once I got it all? How is multiplayer going to work with that setting, based on which player skill will it up the difficulty?

It is better to keep things consistent. Dynamic difficulty would be exploited even with the achievements. Not to say you played a beta where numbers are not final yet.