Puzzles too easy

I got a response from the support team about a month ago confirming that anyone seeing these changes is part of a pilot program to explore a new way to treat puzzles.

"Moving forward, you are right! We are improving our puzzle serving system by readjusting how those are given to players so puzzles that are actually much harder than their rating can be properly rated.

• The same goes for relatively easy puzzles which are rated above than what they should be.

 All in all, the behavior you mentioned is also part of our experiment. Some members are seeing easier puzzles at the beginning of their sessions, and they take a bit longer to become harder within the same session.

"

I have since seen my puzzles return to the old way and while my rating surged to 3,269 at its peek during the pilot, i have since crashed back down to where i was previously. i honestly kind of liked the pilot. before that, i noticed that if i focused on doing puzzles for too long, my performance in games actually declined. I've heard others say this too. but that didn't happen during the pilot puzzle system. i think it had to do with the trial by fire method of the old way that failed to incorporate the repetition element to learning that is important for internalizing the underlying theory.

So while doing so many low rated puzzles in a row gets monotonous and and can feel demoralizing and borderline insulting, you will build a more solid foundation on the lessons learned from these than the old, more random way that would increase the difficulty of the puzzles more rapidly, which i think serves your ego more than your brain. As an intermediate chess player, rarely did i find myself implementing a tactic i recognized in some random puzzle i had done during the old way, but the new way really burned a lot of patterns in to my brain that i was now able to spot from a long way a way during live games. 

the steep penalty of failing a puzzle rated 500 was an added incentive to really focus on the board and take my time with each puzzle, rather than blasting through each one and getting the odd dopamine kick when i knock out a 2500+ rated puzzle or two.

so i see the puzzle pilot as the difference between playing the long game of repetition and the instant gratification route of seeing your difficulty level increase much more quickly, but at the expense or your learning.

this new rating system is a joke. I have been grinding for months to a year to get to 3300 rating in puzzles IN THE OLD RATING SYSTEM . I had to actually SOLVE HIGH RATED PUZZLES. now every user can get to 3300 with only solving low rated puzzles. this makes the puzzle rating completely irrelevant and stupid. puzzle leaderboard has no meaning now. change it back to the way it was!!!! this is so frustrating.

if people are doing puzzles for the rating rather than to learn and improve, then i think they are missing the point and chess.com is right to try and change it.

your logic is so wrong. I am not "doing it for the rating". but, the rating should mean something as there is a leaderboard. if you get to 3000+ by solving 500 rated puzzles, this is not right. looks like chess.com just trying to spoil users with fake rating puzzle. the rating actually SHOWED YOU HOW MUCH YOU IMPROVED. and this is what the rating is for. you are the one who misses the point.

its just a different yard stick. yes, its a pilot program, so by nature, some players will see this effect while others don't, which makes the leaderboard temporarily less relevant. this isn't the moral issue you're making it out to be. get over it. They're trying to make the puzzles more helpful. you're constant whining here about the leaderboard and your rating tells me you are more focused on the bragging rights than improving your game. besides, the support team said the majority of the feedback has been negative so far, which doesn't exactly align with your theory that they are doing it just to "spoil" people. no one wants to eat their vegetables, unsurprisingly.

do you work for chess.com? the puzzles are not "more helpful" now, helpful is to take time and actually solve hard puzzles to get high rating. yeah you can mock me but I know I had to actually WORK to get better and get a high rating. im not "bragging" what are you on about?? 3300 rating came by hard work. you are justifyng this whole thing for shady reasons. why would one want it to change? once the rating had meaning and now it doesn't have anymore. why would anybodywant the rating to be inflated for absolutely no reason? this is a joke. I wont "get over it". this is frustrating.

ok fine. the world is out to get you and "for absolutely no reason". you are a victim and i am an evil, corporate shill for the all powerful chess.com.

happy now?

Comparison is the thief of joy.

Either way, once the pilot program is concluded, everyone's puzzle ratings will be calculated the exact same way, whether their rating increases due to a new way of doing things, or decreases if chess.com decides to return to the old way. in other words, anyone obsessing over their leaderboard ranking will be made whole. so, if some beginner's puzzle rating doubled because of the new way of calculating things, your rating will double too. But maybe take the puzzle rankings with a grain of salt until then?

maybe you should take a break.

Came here after two days of super easy puzzles. I much prefer puzzles that are closer to my rating. Is there a way to fix this?

For those unaware:

You can now change the difficulty of your puzzles in the Web App. (As far as I can tell, there's no way to change your difficult in the app). The default difficulty is "Standard", and it can be changed to "Hard" and "Extra Hard".
Based off of an above user's comments, it seems that puzzles are still expected to adjust to your skill level, although they adjust *much slower*.
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While I understand chess.com's motivation to "game-ify" puzzles, this is easily one of the most bungled product changes I've ever seen. I hope that the chess.com team *urgently* reconsider this plan. I've long used chess.com as my one-stop-shop for all things chess, but this is easily more than enough to make me reconsider.
Some issues:
- Most chess players care about tracking their improvement. Emphasizing points / ratings which can be achieved by completing puzzles without improving is at-best a distraction and at-worst infantilizing.
- Everything about this rollout was entirely unclear to users, and now makes the ratings and leaderboards nearly meaningless.
- Only 3 difficulty settings, hidden away in the web app, and not added to the app after months? What do those settings mean? That is confusing and less convenient than letting chess.com auto-adjust the difficulty to my skill level, which is how users expect the system to work.
- For a little while I thought that I'd gotten better. It was very disappointing to eventually realize, on my own, that the puzzles had just gotten significantly easier. Very frustrating experience.
- I hate the new animations for "leveling-up" in the app. I have no idea what the levels are supposed to mean. I was excited to reach level 20 so that they would finally stop, only to discover that you just start over at level 1 but with a different color/material. Why? Even if some A/B test showed that this improved short-term retention, there's no way this is even a good medium-term motivator for anyone over 8. I don't care what any internal metrics say, this is an insult to users and anyone with product taste. Thankfully I eventually figured out how to disable this feature.
- I could understand having different difficulty settings—sometimes I'm in the mood to solve puzzles that are either easy or hard *for my skill level*. However, both the UI and the implementation are way, way off. It is not at all clear that the product changes were intended to support this (instead, it feels like chess.com wanted to give me dopamine hits by making puzzles easier and show me flashy animations for solving them). Also, the puzzles should adjust to my rating *way, way* quicker than they currently do. I, like many others in this thread, have gone on multiple 20+ streaks without much effort. In fact, one night I doubled by streak record while drunk. I can't emphasize enough how far off-base this is. And this is after chess.com's Puzzle system working great and being a selling point for the site for years!

Everything about the development, product, and QA pipelines that let this be shipped needs to be reconsidered.
Please, please fix soon.

My puzzle rating disappear after 4300. The puzzle statiscs display blank page

There's a bug on the iOS app and staff are aware. The Android app has a bug where the puzzle rating isn't updating on stats and staff are working on that as well.

Change your puzzle Difficulty setting to Hard or Extra Hard. Currently that can only be changed in the website

The new setting is only a week old. The options to change should be coming to the apps in the near future.

The difficulty is a range around your rating (based on changed to the way ratings are handled in the backend) and will still get higher rated puzzles, on average ,as your rating increases. The ratings in the UI are old and aren't ne used for selection or rating algorithms. Those should be updated in the near future as well.

easy

Been saying this for a long time

I have the same problem. I'm just trying to get 4000 elo and then I won't play ranked puzzles anymore because it doesn't make sense

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMQcpu-SOLJ/?igsh=cnV2N29hNGE4ZHFu

I reached 3000 and after that puzzles are 1500-1600 . I thought it's a bug, but after I submitted bug report I got this message: