Hey @MagMalol 👋
Well-put, and you’re not alone in noticing these inconsistencies with the new puzzle difficulty settings and how they affect rating gains/losses.
You're spot-on:
• Standard mode often includes lower-rated puzzles even at high puzzle ratings (like 2800–3000), and unfortunately, the system still applies rating changes based on how everyone performs, so the risk/reward balance can feel completely off.
• Hard seems to pull puzzles closer to your actual range, making it feel more like the original system.
• Very Hard tends to dip into 3500+ puzzles where one wrong click = -30 Elo, but success means big gain, high risk/high reward.
As for the “Show Chat Hints”, nope, having that on doesn’t affect your rating at all (as long as you don’t click any of the hint options). The Elo system only cares whether you solve the puzzle on the first try without using hints or failing.
It’s a bit messy at the moment, and several players (including myself) have found it hard to rely on any one setting consistently. Hopefully, Chess.com fine-tunes the difficulty calibration soon; it does feel like a work in progress.
@JosephReidNZ ♟
Hi, I'm posting here today as I am very curious in regards to the whole new difficulty part of puzzles and how it affects rating. For starters between each difficulty I have noticed some major changes, for instance in standard, with me being a 2800-3000 rated puzzle player, i am often getting puzzles ranging from anywhere to 1500-1800 elo and are extremely easy, however they only reward 5 elo each time, and i lose anywhere from 20-30 elo when i get one wrong, with this setting, i was able to go from 2850 to 3200 (a new peak) in about an hour, and overall i think is a very cheap and bad way to use puzzles as I do not see them being difficult or good for training.
The hard setting appears to be what the puzzles were originally, and the very hard setting seems to up it a lot for a high risk high reward scenario with puzzles that are mostly above your pay grade. Along with this I am also very curious if anyone knows if having the "show chat hints" option on decreases the amount of elo gained at all. Thank you