Tema: Self-adjusting difficulty.
From the staff subforum:
Did any of Capcom's rank systems (or that of any company, for that matter) ever work for you? I'm still not sure what I think about rank myself.
The reason I despise all self-adjusting difficulty systems is quite obvious in my eyes, but maybe it's convenient to explain it all -- they overcomplicate the mechanics in already difficult-enough games. They force you to play unnaturally so you can control the rank, and make you find out and learn the triggers for ranking-up. For non superplay fans who only play under the 1 credit rule, this is not only unnecessary, it's too demanding and therefore annoying. And we just don't need different patterns and layouts depending on our performance -- learning one of them is already a hard task enough.
Konami was especially arrogant with this feature and most likely the model for the rest, which just couldn't tolerate their arcade games becoming "too easy" either.
At least we had Treasure.