Hi. Maybe this is a dumb question but while trying to play through this game on the hardest difficulty sometimes I would look in the gameplay options menu and see that it was mysteriously set to a lower difficulty.

Looking online it seems the game will auto lower the difficulty on death.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/220240/discussions/0/648816743083885300/

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/632849-far-cry-3/64897100

But there are plenty of times I looked in the menu after a death and it was still on master, so it isn't consistent. It's mysterious to me how this works.

So my dumb question is, how do you know the game didn't do this on the current, or any future, master difficulty speedruns? Did y'all know about this and exactly how to avoid it triggering? Should master difficulty speedruns be forced to check the difficulty in the options menu after every death?

In my humble opinion it defeats the point of the category if the rules allow this to happen. Depending on how this thing works, the hypothetical optimal master difficulty run could become just figure out the fastest/earliest way to get the game to auto lower the difficulty and play the rest of the game on the easiest difficulty.

Never runned the game on Master so I did not know it was a thing... Really wierd, maybe it was a bug with a savefile?

Not a dumb question at all. This is something that moderators should know about and if they don't then that is a problem. There may be no way to verify other than being able to recognize how enemies act or how much damage you are taking. I would start by identifying when the game will auto lower the difficulty. It could maybe happen on during missions or maybe only NOT during missions. Then set a rule that you must always adjust difficulty in menu after a death before making further progress. I don't know a lot about the games difficulty system but that seems really really dumb and stupid and dumb too. You should get a pop up if they want to suggest a lower difficulty.