Puzzle algorithm change?

Thanks to those who mentioned the "difficulty" setting, which I had not found. I'd also noticed that the puzzles had become so uniformly easy as to be worthless, unless your goal was just to collect 5 rating points at a time. I can't imagine what the admins thought was better about this than the previous version, but at least maybe I can start getting puzzles that might help me improve again.

Incredibly frustrating, I've been doing puzzles for 4 years and recently was so proud of reaching 2200, then all of a sudden yesterday I stopped getting ANYTHING above 1300, I did hundreds and now have a 3001 rating and am top 47k world...LOl

Prematurely posted that, to conclude my message: this change is insane and is making me want to quit my membership and switch to lichess, not only have the admins dumbed down puzzles so chess is more friendly to beginners and casuals, they've set EVERYONE to this baby mode without saying ANYTHING and I can't even find the difficulty setting within the mobile app, the puzzle menu under settings is barren. Great update! I put blood sweat and tears into my rating and was proud of it, now it means nothing when anyone can just sit on standard and have an inflated rating. It's about learning, not ego, sure, but a solid competitive ranking is a huge motivator for learners.

This is also just so weird to hide the setting in the website, the UI has become so spaghettified and confusing for such an ancient and simple game, I wonder if the chess devs have some kind of ego, it's just chess lads, are you facing too much of the engineer's dilemma and need to create work for yourselves? It's strange to have a puzzle difficulty setting like this isn't silent hill, it's vague to just say "hard" and "extra hard" like I'm not a baby wtf rating range are they?

can't agree more, I opened a new post about it here https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/unfair-rating-inflation-due-to-new-puzzle-rating-system

this new rating system is ABSURD

Completely agregó

The setting will be added to the apps as well as I understand it. They're just not available initially.

Developer add features that are decided on by project staff and site leads. They don't just decide to make changes for the sake of it

As many of you I could not find a setting change on my ipad app. Did find it on website and changed it to "hard" difficulty. Still seems not what I would think of as hard. 36 puzzles in the last two days. 23 were 700 or more, mostly 1000 points or more, below my puzzle rating. One puzzle above my rating but only by 6 points.. Now my ipad app doesn't keep a running list of puzzles solved with other data as it has up until today. SMH

They've really made a mess of the puzzles suddenly. Yes, you can set the difficulty to "hard" but apparently there's a bug where it only gives one hard puzzle and then starts serving up standard/easy ones again. Like they've got the code that checks for the difficulty level in the wrong place so it "resets" to standard while it's still set to something else. At least that's been my experience the last couple days. Rokor5 is correct that now the ratings mean nothing because a 3300 on "hard" or "extra hard" is not the same as a 3300 on "standard." The whole premise behind the rating system is so the difficulty can adjust itself. You shouldn't need to set it or be able to. Who created this current monstrosity?

I just got word that they will fix this all soon.

I just don't understand what the point of a rating is in the first place, if it does none of the below:

1. Act as a leaderboard where you can compete and measure yourself against other players.
The ratings are now arbitrary and you have the same rating regardless of difficulty setting. I'm 2k+ puzzle rating but I have yet to see a single puzzle above ~1200. I have higher rating than other players although my puzzles are easier than theirs.

2. Act as a measure for your own puzzle solving skills.
As mentioned before, despite being 2k+ puzzle rated I almost exclusively get fed ~800 rated back rank mates. I can't use the rating to measure my skill if there's no difference in difficulty of the puzzles I'm being served with a 800 rating and 2000 rating.

Except for a painfully transparent attempt at farming dopamine hits through mobile game-esque flashy (and unnecessary) graphics (that also only work until the disappointment of the meaninglessness of the system hits you), rating currently mean nothing and serve no purpose. I find this very sad, as this seems to be a recent development away from a system that was generally well liked.