Hi,
I’ve noticed this countless times that playing (and playing good) for a while in one session the game gets harder.
Everything gets more “againts the favor of the player” like it wasn’t before: Monsters somehow one shot more, situations becoming deadly, 10-15 lvls below personal best Pit failing, almost like the game decides you cannot win this situation no matter what.
Seems like putting the game away for a while resets this, and then it builds up again. I used to play COD during Black Ops Cold War and Vanguard and had sort of similar frustrating experience (as many, MANY others) due to the tuning and the presence of the skill based match making. For that eventually I quit COD and refuse to buy any other entry until SBMM is present in every game mode.
So my question is to a blue: Is there a skill / time based hidden difficulty director (or whatever) in the game?
To clarify, “director” here means something built into the game, yes?
Also, if I understood the overall experience (and if by “a while” you mean weeks or season-to-season), my guess is this kind of tuning happens ~every season, and periodically in mid-season patches. But sometimes it’s not communicated in patch notes.
Just a guess here: I don’t expect you’ll get a blue response.
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No.
They can barely fix bugs…you think they coded some hidden “director” to make your game harder as you progress based on frequency of play? They do mid-season patches, and some shadow adjustments to things like IH, drop rate…and the like, but this is manually done.
More likely you changed something, possibly a piece of gear or an aspect that was helping you more than you realized.
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It’s possible it’s a change in OP’s setup, but my bet is they’ve checked & also that it’s recurring. “A while” is probably key here. Values of affixes & effectiveness of stats have changed over time, esp season to season. “A while” might mean 1-2 seasons.
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and he is the last Barb to realize what happened? 
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I can say that on all of my classes, If i stay in the same difficulty, Use the same gear, Aspects and such, It all stays the same.
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Replying here as one by one would be a mess.
Under “a while” I meant around 1-2 days of time. I’m aware of the patches and seasons, I’ve been around in Diablo for 20+ years now, not the patches (RIP HotA) or equipment changes.
Thinking about it something like the Hellborne meter in Helltides: you fill it up, difficulty goes up. You die (a couple of times) difficulty goes down.
Almost every game uses some sort of clever system like this in the background these days. Dying due to the same jump or tight situation 5 times in a row and the 6th one tightly and miraculously succeeds? Good chance the game helped in your favor just a little bit.
I feel somethig similar here as well just the other way around. If I remember right there were some discussions regarding the tuning of SBMM (and difficulty in general) and the assumption was that if the player struggles and hits a wall after progression (loses match, fails Pit, etc) it will spend more time in the game to overcome the barrier in contrast the ones who were unhindered in their progression.
Ugh. Dystopic. I sure hope it’s not in the game.