I HATE Auto-Adjusting Difficulty

I'll make this short and sweet:

Some developers may think that it's cool for a game's difficulty to auto-adjust to each unique player, but — in actuality — it is an idea worthy of being shot and drug through the streets.

I hate auto-adjusting difficulty for three main reasons:

1) It punishes good play by making the game endlessly tougher. "You thought you'd gotten good? HA! We'll REALLY kick your ass, now!" Part of the fun of a game is the satisfaction of seeing how good you've gotten; to expertly clear areas that were tough at first. Auto-adjusting difficulty takes that away.

2) It indirectly encourages you not to excel, but rather, to do just good enough to get by in order to keep the difficulty manageable.

3) It creates an uneven measuring stick between yourself and other players. Any moron that sucked enough to get a free ride through a game that an expert busted his ass to beat gets the same reward at the end. This destroys any true sense of accomplishment in beating a game. It also hurts the feeling of community between people playing the same game. GOOD GAMER: "Man, that level seven boss was a bitch, huh?" BAD GAMER: "Uh, what? He went down in, like, three shots for me."

Auto-adjusting difficulty is a poor and lazy replacement for good game balancing. Simply offering different difficulty settings (i.e. Easy, Normal and Hard) is a much better solution. It still lets gamers of different skill levels play, but that measuring stick is still in place.

So, in short, you game developers out there — no more auto-adjusting difficulty. Please.