Recent change to puzzles / tactics?

There seems to be recent changes that have been implemented into the puzzles / tactics mode:

1. You can now have coach to essentially tell you what the idea of the puzzle is about - I can totally see why this can benefit (newer) players; but still getting the same (?) rating when solving puzzles when having this option activated seems to completely defeat the purpose of having puzzles rated. (That being said, it somehow defeats the purpose of solving puzzles in general, because having to find the key idea and calculating if it works or not is the main and crucial part of solving a puzzle)

2. Apart from my regular puzzle rating range, I seem to get much lower (like, 1000 rating lower) rated puzzles on a regular basis now, too. I actually somehow like this, because having a wider range of difficulty rating in rated puzzles makes training with puzzles more applicable to real games.

But, is it intended like this?

3. What (else) exactly has been changed? I can´t seem to find any news article on this.

It would be great if the site would inform us as users when such dramatic changes are applied, so we don´t need to figure out on our own.

Thanks!

There wasn't any news release I don't think as some changes hadn't been fully rolled out, at least on 1.

On 2, there are a couple of different things happening. One is that there are new backend ratings for puzzles, that are often different than what is shown in the UI. At some point the interface will be updated to show the new ratings. Also, some members have a slightly different puzzle selection algorithm as well. Not sure if either of those will get an announcement when they are fully updated and everyone is back on the same algorithm.

Ok, thank you - interesting.

Is the thing with the new backend ratings intended to fix the problem with puzzles that have a very low percentage of correctly solved tries (i.e. underrated puzzles) ?

Update: I´m getting pretty much exclusively very underrated puzzles now, which is about to basically crush my rating, since I am only able to get +5 realistically when solving correctly, but can lose up to -23 when getting a puzzle wrong now. All that while the puzzle difficulty is effectively unchanged.

So please: What the heck is going on here and was this really necessary? Thank you.

Just wanted to post I’ve also had a marked sudden decrease in puzzle difficulty. I’m only rated 1700 or so in puzzles, but I was getting mostly 1300-1800 rated puzzles leading up to this. Suddenly starting on 3/15 it started feeding me a ton of sub 1000 rated puzzles, like 20-30 of them in a row, with a handful up to around 1200 rating. I will also say a small few of those seemed much harder than they were rated - many moves that were not as obvious as a 400 rated puzzles should be. I was gone on vacation until today, did some puzzles today, it’s still deflated. Although I did get one 1800 rated puzzle that was a single move, seemed way too easy for an 1800. So I feel like something got out of wack with the puzzle rating algorithm backend.

Yeah experiencing the same thing. Very confusing. I dislike it a lot because it seems to encouraging grinding. Don't get as much value from the puzzles as I used to when they were consistently difficult.

They were more fun when they were harder. My rating did a weird thing plummeting from 3400 or so in February to below 3100 at the beginning of May, and then I gradually clawed my way back and broke 3500 for the first time today. But every puzzle I saw today, out of 20 or more, was sub-3000.

I actually had the coach tell me to calculate for checkmate when the idea of the puzzle was just winning a rook. I was a little upset, especially since I lost 17 elo from it (which isn't out of the ordinary. I gain maybe 5 - 10 a puzzle and lose that and then some if I miss a puzzle). You can still turn off the 'Point mode' so you can focus solely on your rating. I haven't tried it yet, but maybe it removes the coach as well?

I can't you how many times I've gone from 2200 down to 2000 and back again on various chess websites. Strange how it gives you puzzles that aren't for your rating. Do you still gain a decent amount of elo?

For me its similar. Out of the 20 puzzles I did today, 5 Puzzles had a rating below 1900, with an overall average of 2222 puzzle rating, while my personal rating is >2600.

What's very odd is that all of those sub 1900 puzzles had a relatively low percentage of correct solves, from 24.3% (1807) to 37% (1876), with an average of 31%. The lowest rated puzzle had 1623 (35.5%) what's more than 1k below my puzzle rating.

In this particular case my performance was 1 of 5 for the puzzles below 1900 (1786 avg) and 11 of 15 for the rest (2368 avg) what leads to a rating change of +6 in total.

Usually I love doing puzzles on this site, but this behavior is just discouraging. And today (I try to do 20 puzzles a day) was still "ok". Some of the puzzle distributions I got on the recent days were way more of. Cant provide any statistics on those, because you now also can only see the last 25 puzzles you tried. But the current selection of puzzles and some of the associated ratings seem very unfair to me and for me take away the fun of doing puzzles.

Hi guys, my puzzle rating is around 2600/2700 but im only getting 800 elo type of puzzles (like mates in 2, in 3). when i win i only get +5 ofc but when i lose i get -25. it is really annoying bc there is no point in playing puzzles anymore if you exclusively have underleveled ones. does any know why they changed the system? i would like to have puzzles related to my rating so i can actually improve. it is really weird, the old system was fine

I wish I would know.

Although the rating difference is not as extreme as in your case, it is still somewhat similar for me, so the problem did not change.

Because of that I simply made the conclusion for me that I don´t strive to necessarily focus at my tactics rating any more, I only solve puzzles for accuracy now to help me improve in real games.

It is sad that the tactics rating gets absolutely unreliable because of this fact - before, I tried to correlate the tactics elo to rapid or even OTB rating - which I found is possible, in general, and is a nice thing to track your progress, at least in tactics. But with this specific, unfortunate mechanic, progress tracking via improvement in tactics elo seems pretty much unreliable.