(though just as many companies go evil and lean into this instead). This also helps rein in problematic spending patterns in case players keep failing despite buying boosters aka. Another realization was that it doesn't help monetization if a player fails a level 20x versus maybe 5x, so many studios code their games in a way that after frequent failures, the difficulty subtly or sometimes not-so-subtly drops. This helps players get into the flow and start their session off with more likely success. In the various tile matching puzzle companies I worked in, level difficulties are also nerfed at runtime when they occur as the first few levels of your current play session. Usually, a wavy or sawtooth-type difficulty curve from level to level is approximated for games with "endless" progression and several daily sessions, so you get small progressions of harder and harder levels. Then, the designers tweak them - the infamous Level 65 in the original Candy Crush Saga was nerfed this way - either by changing probabilities of certain pieces spawning, increasing turn allowances, or reducing objective counts. The trick is not to design for a specific difficulty, the trick is to design many levels in one go, and then order them according to apparent difficulty by manual and automated testing and also with data coming from live players. and conversely, for a team it might take a while for them to onboard a new designer onto "their" particular game. So there's a certain job security in being a good Match-3 designer :). Level design takes a certain skill, and new or amateur designers will often try to build "puzzle" levels or gimmick levels, or can't make levels hard enough because they themselves can't play at the needed difficulty level yet. (King published some of this research, you can Google the full docs) Levels of games in that genre are primarily edited by hand, but then extensively categorized, classified and automation tested with heuristic or probabilistic and decision-based testing methods, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search. Making Levels for these games becomes an economy of scale and consistency.
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