The Dynamic Difficulty Discussion Thread

[Heroesandvillains]

Hello all! Baseball is finally here and with that SCEA has given us a lot of new features this year! And with all new features, feedback is essential in getting these modes fleshed out and perfected over time. This is a place to discuss any and all things Dynamic Difficulty related.

As for me? I'm using it exclusively this year in conjunction with Quick Counts. 4 games down, so here are some early impressions on the Mode.

In years past, I've essentially been an All-Star Hall of Famer. Meaning, I'm ALWAYS slightly too good for AS and slightly too sucky for HOF. I was an in-betweener like a lot of you. Yet, here comes SCEA with a little gift for us. Ten Difficulty Levels essentially. And different grading for both hitting and pitching!

Initially, I'd assumed that after even just four games, the mode would have graduated me to All-Star already. Not the case!

Four games with LAD, and I'm still a Rookie+ hitter. So that means I must be raking right now. Right? No. That's wrong.

.260 team average. 6 dingers. Graduation day is going to take some time and this is what I love most about the mode so far. Baseball is a game of ups and downs and the system seems to be designed with that in mind. Don't expect to get to Legend after a couple killer games. That won't happen.

Another excellent touch seems to be how the demotion process works. Here's an example: Last night my pitching difficulty got boosted to "Veteran." Then, I promptly got slaughtered.

It appears in the early going that the system is smart enough to not demote you an entire Level. Meaning, it seems like no matter how bad I play from this point forward, the game knows I'm too good for Rookie (which) and will never make me go back there.

This is a brilliant idea. Baseball is a game of good days and bad days, and getting beat by a better team over the course of a series does not mean the game will not spoon feed you and soften the AI up too much. This keeps the Difficulty leveling realistically SIM and a good investment of your time.

Initially, it seems to me that OBP is king here (though I couldn't find that defined in the Digital Manual). Both for hitting and pitching. Your graduation depends on it. And you know what? I think that's the right way to go about it as OBP is an excellent representation of talented you are as a Show player. I know it's early, and I can't say for certain it doesn't work this way, but it would be nice to see some additional logic once the player's Difficulty Level flattens out to take into account specific strengths and weaknesses (such as BB/9, H/9, K/9, HR, AVG, SO, BB, etc) and adjust those individual sliders independent of one another accordingly

I have more ideas on that but I'll share them after I spend some more quality time with the Mode.

Anyway, feel free to share your thoughts and progress on the Mode. I'm looking forward to how everyone else feels about it!

[A_Quiet_Pro]

That's just pure awesome sauce.

[bcruise]

Copy/Pasting my previous posts on this subject from the Impression/Q@A threads....

Quote:

My first impression of the Dynamic Difficulty feature is that it's something that will take a while to give you a true reading on, but once the game finds your sweet spot you might never have to mess with difficulty again. The way it works is that it starts you on a level called Rookie+ for both hitting and pitching, then updates every half inning and gives you feedback in the form of + or -'s. For example if you have two big offensive innings in a row you'll likely have two plusses when the third starts. I would assume that when you have enough plusses or minuses either way, it will adjust the actual difficulty level. As I said, that's not particularly easy to do. I had a big 2nd and third inning at the plate, but by the 7th I've cooled off and back to no progress either way. It's going to probably take me a while to get off Rookie + with the way this is done, but I like that it won't just boomerang back and forth because of one huge inning. Pitching and Hitting are adjusted separately, which means you could end up on Vet hitting and Legend pitching.

Quote:

So mean.. It definitely didn't go like I expected, at least I won but it was close! CPU wasn't chasing much early on and mashing Shark's inaccurate pitches. CPU also threw plenty of balls too, even if it didn't walk me. It's not going to be easy to get the OPS needed consistently to move up (or down) in difficulty (OPS is what it bases progress on, so says the in-game strategy guide). I like your idea of doing it in Spring Training - that seems like a good way of learning your team and your ideal difficulty at the same time.

Quote:

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how/if QC affects the difficulty changes. It's hard to explain, but when you have a pre-determined count you're likely to see much more realistic situations than if a user pitched/hit for every pitch. Someone who swings at everything could potentially end up at a higher difficulty than they otherwise would, since they wouldn't be swinging at early count balls. As for me...I bumped up to Veteran hitting during my first QC game (on a different settings profile than the non-QC one, I want to keep those seperate). It was a 9-4 win where I got 10 hits, and the change actually happened mid-inning and not only between innings. It might be a good idea to find a good QC difficulty setting, and then try to work your way up to that point without QC. I think I'm going to try that, for one thing it's a lot faster process with QC + Fast Play. There's a couple of other constraints on the difficulty changes I didn't know about until reading the guide: - Only one difficulty shift per game. Progress is halted for the rest of the game if it happens. - Can't demote unless you're trailing by 3 or more runs, and can't promote unless you're up 3 runs or more. Not sure how/if this part applies to RTTS.

Quote:

Updating my dynamic difficulty progress after about 15 quick count games played: I've successfully made the jump up to All-Star on both hitting and pitching. I've actually been on AS Hitting for a few games while the pitching lagged behind on Vet+. Hitting appears to have stabilized for the most part, still a slight upward trend because I haven't seen a - in progress yet. I could realistically see myself getting to AS+ or even HOF given enough time, and I think I'd have a good experience on any of them. Jury's still out on pitching since I just made that jump I've been trying to make for several games. It really takes a great pitching performance to move up, but once you do it'll be extremely hard to demote (unless you get repeatedly shelled). Walks have definitely started appearing on AS, so no worries there. QC helps some with that, of course. Loving this feature so far, and, given enough time, it's giving me exactly what I expected to see in terms of judging my own skill level.

[the_future420]

Man I'm so looking forward to getting this game to see how this works. In the past I have been a slider junkie for all sports games and I like that this kinda takes a big chunk of that out. Anything that allows the user to just pick up and play is a plus. This should lead to more time to actually enjoy the game and spend less fiddling with sliders. Kudos for implementing this SDS

[ckarlic]

Dumb question..is dynamic difficulty an option you choose for difficulty setting? Where can I find that setting?

[bcruise]

Quote: Originally Posted by ckarlic

Dumb question..is dynamic difficulty an option you choose for difficulty setting? Where can I find that setting?

It's just a "difficulty" that you select in the same place in user settings as Rookie, Pro, All-Star, etc. Just scroll until you see dynamic, and make sure whatever profile you changed it on is the one you're using when you start a game.

[ckarlic]

Quote: Originally Posted by bcruise

It's just a "difficulty" that you select in the same place in user settings as Rookie, Pro, All-Star, etc. Just scroll until you see dynamic, and make sure whatever profile you changed it on is the one you're using when you start a game.

Thanks. I will look for it when I get home tonight. Like Heros mentioned, I too am normally a Allstar/HOF player (in betweener as he stated) and would like to give this a shot. Looking forward to trying it out.

[RogueHominid]

I'm so glad you started this thread. I have been wondering exactly how this works, but like you, I decided to just ride with dynamic difficulty so I could play the game without getting into slideritis.

This could be the biggest breakthrough of the year if it truly does adjust difficulty level and slider level on the fly.

OP, is it your sense that dynamic difficulty allows you to be "hands off" with sliders as well as difficulty levels, or are you looking at some slider adjustments too?