Hi anth,
From what I'm reading, that seems normal. The bank/play mode divide is mostly for footswitch operation. You only call up a saved preset explicitly in bank mode. If you put it in play mode, it still operates on whichever effect/preset was loaded. As long as you don't save with the new settings, you should be able to navigate to a different preset and then back to the orginal, retaining the original values.
-Russ