# V2 AI Director And Smart Matchmaking

## Runtime Scope

The V2 AI Director is a single-player pacing layer above per-bot Adaptive AI. It
observes session-level signals only in Story, Side Stories, Arcade, Towers of
Time, Tekken Force, Devil Within, Konquest, Def Jam Story, and MyCAREER style
CPU modes. Ranked and tournament modes never run the Director; they use the
static rule-of-the-day and fixed CPU/queue policy.

The Director state machine is:

1. Calm
2. Build
3. Climax
4. Recovery

Signals are recent win rate, session length, repeated rage-quit, repeated
same-mistake, declining session time, and declining session frequency.

## Difficulty And Tutorial Rules

The Director maps the player's rolling-average skill into a CPU skill bucket and
feeds an approximate skill hint to pre-fight banter. In Story, Side Stories, and
Arcade, three consecutive losses trigger a difficulty step-down suggestion. Five
perfect wins trigger a step-up suggestion.

The accessibility adaptive difficulty profile
`AI.AdaptiveDifficulty.PerPlayer.V2` is a separate per-player opt-in layer at
`Settings.Accessibility.AdaptiveDifficulty`. It uses deaths, retries,
consecutive failures, completion time versus authored target time, and perfect
clears to resolve bounded single-player difficulty steps before feeding CPU
skill, incoming damage, and pacing scalars.

Rubber-banding is available only as a single-player toggle, defaults off, and is
blocked in ranked and tournament modes. Frustration signals bridge into
tutorial-on-demand and Smart Help so the weakest observed area opens the
matching trainer.

## Tendency Profile

The per-player tendency profile is observed across sessions, stored alongside
Save Game, and never shared cross-account. CPU response covers preferred wake-up
choice, throw-tech rate, anti-air consistency, and mix-up reliance. Smart Help
uses the weakest-area signal to surface the relevant trainer.

## Climax Moments

Boss encounters in Director modes can enter Climax. Climax enables the cinematic
camera, environmental hazards, crowd hype audio, Niagara atmospheric ramp, and a
per-fighter Climax line bank reserved for those moments.

## Smart Matchmaking

Online matchmaking remains separate from single-player difficulty. Queue scoring
prefers lower RTT inside the current MMR tolerance window, then expands skill,
ping, and eligible regions over wait time. Anti-stomp routing keeps
smurf-flagged accounts in a separate pool. Party queues can bias toward
preferred friends. Per-region MMR tiers stay aligned, with off-peak cross-region
widening.

## Transparency And Compliance

Settings expose `Settings.Gameplay.AIDirector`, which discloses single-player
Director use and lists observed signals. Opt-out locks single-player difficulty
to manual and falls back to static CPU profiles. The EU AI Act limited-risk
surface documents the conformity assessment, and per-player Director profile
data is covered by data subject rights routing.