Adaptive Game Difficulty

From Zanecorpwiki

Getting a game tuned just right would be hard enough if it weren't impossible. The problem is that different people are going to want different things at different times.

Satisfying that can be hard too, but in some games I actually don't think it would be very hard. Something like a tower defense would be easy enough to do. The difficulty represents how much press the player rather than a pre-set progression. At a hard difficulty, the AI would try and tune the attack so that the user can always just win, but can't afford any mistakes.

I believe the best way to do it would be a cyclic system of slower and faster ramp ups. This gives the AI time to fine-tune it's ramping match at each stage without pushing the user over the edge. Because there's some give in terms of lives to lose, the player could, for instance, fall behind on a harder cycle but then make it up a bit in the easier cycles while the AI ramps back a little bit in the off before putting the pressure back on.