Comment by orbital-decay
17 hours ago
As opposed to the game designer who came up with an idea that sounds convincing but barely ever tested it. My comment had nothing to do with "git gud", it's poorly worded perhaps.
Of course there's a ton of this, which is exactly why I complain. Level scaling is probably the easiest to justify because it solves legitimate issues (that are often caused by other poor decisions), but other types are usually much worse.
> My comment had nothing to do with "git gud"
Fair enough, I applied that lens to it on my own.
Allow me to elaborate on my earlier comment and reply to this one here:
A ton of it? No, I don't see that. It's probably the least commonly implemented approach to difficulty (curves).
Dynamically adjusted difficulty has been around for a long time, but it's never been broadly adopted. There's a lot of reasons for this I'm sure, but a couple of obvious ones are that executives don't tend to throw money at features they can't see [or game developers in general], and that it's a tricky thing to build anyway.
It's certainly not the default solution to the problem, but there's a long history of games implementing some form of dynamically adjusted difficulty. Some of them to great success with the difficulty system itself being celebrated (Xevious, Resident Evil 4, Left 4 Dead), the vast majority of them you have no idea even implemented such a feature, and there's also a number of famous examples that were widely derided for it (Oblivion, ...?). [I'm genuinely stumped to think of another famously bad example, not trying to make it look like there are fewer of one than the other. I'm sure there are just as many negatively viewed ones as I can come up with positive ones.]
While it's obviously possible that an individual designer/team didn't thoroughly test their particular feature, the concept itself has been very well tested in a wide variety of implementations/mechanics. And if you're playing a game designed by people who didn't test it, the difficulty scaling seems likely to be the least of your problems.