Puzzles with very low pass rates now appearing often

Recently I have noticed a large fraction of puzzles I am being served up have pass rates under 10%, often under 5% and sometimes as low as 0.5%.  This is taking a toll on my puzzle rating. I had recently hit 2300 which is a decent level, but have been pushed back 100pts in large part because of these near impossible puzzles.  Maybe this is just what happens at that level, but it seems like too hard of a shift in the puzzles. Is this what others have experienced? Any insight appreciated.  

I think they are adding a lot of new puzzles.

From the last monthly report.

I have noticed the same thing. I hit 2700 a few days ago then got several puzzles with very low pass rates that are rated relatively easily (like a 1900 puzzle with a 1% pass rate?). My puzzle rating has fallen like a rock since. I don't really care about my puzzle rating, but it does feel like something changed abruptly.

I was approaching 1700 which is high for me up until recently... Now I'm getting puzzles back to back that are quite rough.

I have noticed junk puzzles, the solution is far from any advantage gained

Me too, my puzzle rating went down by about 300 points.

Thanks for the responses so far.

So it appears I am not alone with this puzzle problem... nice to know. Regarding your comment @justbefair, the puzzles I am seeing have been completed 100s of times so they might be relatively new, but are not brand new and are being revealed as extremely difficult - without a correspondingly high rating as you noted @illinichris so there does seem to be a problem with them, beyond just being new.  

I would add that the puzzles I am seeing often require sequences of 6-7 moves for complete success rather than 3-4. I would not say they are junk puzzles but they seem waaaaaay above both their stated difficult rating and for my level and I agree the gain from them seems tiny compared to the risk of making an error.  

Here is a good examples of what I am talking about:

Attempts 830,  Pass rate 0.4% (although now showing 0% rounded down I presume, Rating 2271, 5 moves to win: https://www.chess.com/puzzles/problem/1223221   

If you think it's fair/doable, please explain 830 straight failures vs 0 successes from the community on this one.  Is it a junk puzzle? I want to say no - I did see the importance of getting the Queen to e4 (but missed the move to e2) when studying it, but was concerned with how many moves that sequence required since most puzzles don't involve a delicate series of in-between positioning moves and I am skeptical I am on the right path when I see lines like that and give up on them too early, but if noone gets it right after 800 tries is it worth having in the database? At minimum it should be rated higher and not served up to chess mortals like me.   

Came here with the same thought. Some of these puzzles are ridiculous. I've been over 2600 in the past but am now down around 2250 from many of these .5% pass rate puzzles. It used be about 1 out of 10 puzzles would be these type and now it seems like 1/3 or even 1/2 have these very low pass rates.

If you just click on the puzzle url, you should see it.

same

Interesting thought. Perhaps true. The proof would be in the pass rate for higher rated players.

One thing I am not clear on is how puzzle rating is determined. It would seem to me that % Pass should basically determine the rating. Or more accurately, % Pass by ranking... in other words if among those at ~2300 25% or more can solve this puzzle, then maybe it's ok it be served up to me, even if only 1% of people at ~1500 can solve it. Given that most people are at the lower end of the rating scale the pass rate of a puzzle like this can be skewed very low if it is randomly assigned.

That said, as far as I understand, puzzles are not randomly assigned and therefore this puzzle should not be being assigned to people at a low level and STILL it has a negligible pass rate. This would suggest it is not correctly rated or just bad, even though I agree with you that on the surface of it it doesn't seem totally unfair, just very tough.     

Same thing here. As  chessplayer012830  said, there are 1/2 chance to get this puzzle. And the difference in difficulty is easly spotted - I can't solve it nearly ever. Or never. These puzzles should be on a much higher level, because it spends huge amount of time to actually figure 1-2 moves ahead, what makes my learning from resolving puzzles highly ineffective. If there was really no problem like ChessPuzzleLover stated, we would give 3000+ rating puzzles to everyone, because "these junk puzzles might actually improve their play making your tactics in games more precise".

Man I'm just trying to get to 1200

Thanks again for others sharing their experience, like @hikaruM. I'm not sure where this leaves things. Clearly there is some problem with extremely difficult puzzles being assigned quite often to some players, making it near impossible to increase your level, and gobbling up a ton of time as we scratch our heads trying to solve puzzles no one ever solves, punishing our rating.  Perhaps a letter to Chess.com support is in order to understand why puzzles with very low pass rates are proliferating. Not sure what else might be done.

Ideas? 

1,102,023 abuse reports were received, but out of those only 95,298 accounts were either muted or closed??? That's less than 10% lmao

I have been doing tactics and have seen puzzles like those quite a few times as well in different rating ranges. I think they are really good puzzles, but simply in a wrong rating category. I'm not sure how chess.com adjusts a puzzle's rating over time, but maybe a solution is to make it more sensitive to pass rate or give a smaller rating penalty if too few people passed a puzzle. A 0% pass rate definitely means something wrong.

These puzzles have gotten so punitive that I have stopped using chess.com puzzles. Switched to other non-chess.com puzzles. Extremely difficult puzzles that cost you 12-16 points if wrong but correct solution and you get 5 points.