Difficulty setting and it's impact on custom sliders

[jah.volunteer]

Hello all,

There seems to be a long standing theory that the starting difficulty setting (Hall of Fame vs Pro for example) impacts your customs gameplay sliders and their perceived effects.

Has an actual game developer ever confirmed that this is in fact true?

Thank you for your input!

[res2]

Re: Difficulty setting and it's impact on custom sliders

We had an interesting discussion about this a year or two ago. I was in the camp that the initial setting (Rookie, Pro, HoF, etc.) had hidden, behind the scenes changes that would impact gameplay.

For example, I thought if you start on HoF thre would be more CPU "cheating" to allow them to play better than the same sliders that started on Rookie.

I took a challenge from a poster who thought I was wrong. The other poster hypothesized that the same sliders started on Rookie and HoF would play the same.

So - I ran an experiment. Played 3 games vs. the same team using my sliders. The first 3 games using sliders that started from Rookie. The next 3 games using sliders started on HoF.

To my surprise, I found no difference in how the games played out. I came back and admitted despite the frequent community assumptions (and perhaps some comments from 2K over the years) it was not apparent to me from my 6-game experiment that there was much/any difference based on which level you started your sliders on.

Could be small sample size and there may be differences. But nothing I could see from those 6 games.

With that said, I still usually start on All Star for my sliders...just in case.

[EccentricMeat]

Re: Difficulty setting and it's impact on custom sliders

The only information I’ve ever seen came from Da Czar when this change was first implemented, and he said that higher difficulty settings enabled a better/more robust version of ACE and that HOF would give the best ACE adjustments from the CPU.

This is tough to test because each game plays out differently and it’s hard to tell what is a “better ACE adjustment” vs what’s just a random streak of luck.

[ggsimmonds]

Re: Difficulty setting and it's impact on custom sliders

The only information I’ve ever seen came from Da Czar when this change was first implemented, and he said that higher difficulty settings enabled a better/more robust version of ACE and that HOF would give the best ACE adjustments from the CPU.

This is tough to test because each game plays out differently and it’s hard to tell what is a “better ACE adjustment” vs what’s just a random streak of luck.

I remember something similar but significantly different in one aspect. If I recall I think he suggested superstar because that opens up all the ACE adjustments to the AI without giving them the stat boosts the other levels do.

Of course what that this means for this year I cannot say. I first started with Schnaidt's sliders using pro or all star as the base. Then I switched to Eccentric's using superstar as the base and haven't seen a difference in the "intelligence" of the AI.
Seems there are all sorts of bugs relating to ACE at the moment so I may need to revisit this after patches

[MakaveliLPC]

Re: Difficulty setting and it's impact on custom sliders

This has been left in answered for so long... It's my opinion that changing the difficulty before inputting sliders changes nothing. Just superstition