zex20913
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I've recently returned from a ~3 month hiatus, due to moving and exploration of my new environs. And I come back, looking forward to some of the new holds that I'd missed out on.

Oddly enough, it seems that most of the recent holds are "over 5" in terms of difficulty. Fortunately, they are also over 5 in likability.

I feel that the scale has gotten...out of sorts. I haven't played all of these holds, but are all of them tougher than KDD the first time you played it? The 3-mother room? The level 15 orb puzzle? Really?

If not, perhaps people need to rethink their votes--I get the sense that we're thinking that 5 is "easy", when it should be "middling" at the least. I could be wrong of course.

If so, perhaps we need to change the base scale--make KDD a 4 or a 3, so there is more of an appropriate difficulty rating for current/recent holds.

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Jatopian
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Nothing needs to change in the system. However, we need to hunt down all instances where anyone or anything posited KDD as an absolute 5 and excise or footnote them. Yes, that includes Erik Hermansen's forum posts. It's not like he'll ever notice anyway. Then we need to redefine '5' as "average".

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[Last edited by Jatopian at 02-11-2009 08:03 PM]

Neather2
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Well, i always give no less then 5, but a lot of holds here need it. And "5" in this times are not a very bad vote.

Try my hold, Slayer's End, Devilishly Dangerous Dungeon of Doom (SMS), Homeward Adventure, Reflections, and some like that, these are some trickly holds.

Also, think that DROD has a lot of puzzles idea but these aren't infinite.
I'm working on a hold that will is about never-played rooms and hard advanced concepts. I hope i will do something good.

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Conspiracy, my new hold, has just been released.

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[Last edited by Neather2 at 02-11-2009 08:18 PM]

CuriousShyRabbit
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I think we might be taking the difficulty rating a bit too seriously here. There are so many different ways a hold can be difficult, it's hard to capture with just one number.

For example, Larry's new hold, Wolly Olly and the Adder, is difficult because the player needs a complete grasp of unbrained snake movement rules, which are complex as compared to the movements of roaches or golems. The_Red_Hawk's new hold, Lightning, is difficult because the player needs near-perfect technique to get through those horde rooms in a reasonable number of moves, if at all. Jacob's hold from last summer, Choose Your Adventure, is difficult because the player needs to be aware of the many unique interactions between various game elements (example: a stalwart stunned by an aumtlich spins around clockwise). I have a tough time rating the difficulty of those holds on the same scale. Is being a walking encyclopedia easier or harder than being an expert snake wrangler? And is that easier or harder than having perfect efficiency? I really think that varies depending on the player. When rating holds, I just go with my gut feeling and leave a comment on the Holds board. More players should leave comments there.

KDD is one of the toughest holds for me to pin down in terms of difficulty. It was the first DROD hold I ever played, so my initial impression of the hold's difficulty is all mixed up with how difficult it is for an old Rabbit to learn a new game. Yeah, I had a tough time with that three tar mother room the first time around. That's because I didn't fully understand tar growth and I didn't have a lot of experience cutting tar. However, when replaying the hold about a year later, the three tar mother room was no problem. I'd say the vast majority of tarstuff puzzles we've seen lately are harder than that one. (Incidentally, it speaks to Erik's skill as an architect that he understood the room would be difficult for first-timers and that he made them feel really good about solving it.) That two room two tar mother puzzle on level 24, however, that's another story.

Another thing that makes the difficulty of KDD hard to pin down is its size and wide variety of rooms. There are tons of really easy rooms in the early levels, and some tougher rooms in the later levels. So should 5 be the difficulty rating of the hardest room in KDD, or the median, or the average, or the rooms we like the best? I have a much easier time rating the difficulty of a single KDD room than the difficulty of the entire hold. I'd say the individual rooms range from 0.5 brains to 7 brains.

agaricus5
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CuriousShyRabbit wrote:
There are so many different ways a hold can be difficult, it's hard to capture with just one number.

Heh. I had wanted to post a reply, but I think you've summed it up in far better words than I could have!

I have a tough time rating the difficulty of those holds on the same scale. Is being a walking encyclopedia easier or harder than being an expert snake wrangler? And is that easier or harder than having perfect efficiency? I really think that varies depending on the player. When rating holds, I just go with my gut feeling and leave a comment on the Holds board. More players should leave comments there.

I agree; difficulty definitely does depend on the player. For example, I am good at monster manipulation, but awful at specific solution/perfect efficiency rooms. I just can't hold that many keystrokes in my head and understand what it all means!

In addition to the points about differences in rooms, I believe there is another important factor that makes the rating system difficult to standardize: CaravelNet. The general process of room optimisation (with the goal of getting the coveted "1st place!" first) is by definition harder than practically every room ever conceived!

If you optimise a lot, I imagine it will skew your concept of difficulty downwards by quite a bit you force rooms to become significantly more difficult (although the emphasis does end up on specific solution/perfect efficiency). I've found that watching and beating other people's demos is as educational as it is frustrating, and that many of my advanced techniques have been picked up from the rest of you amazing players!

So, if I were to rate hold difficulty simply taking into account my current ability and how hard a perfect solution is, my "average" would be 3-4 and I would probably go no higher than 6-7. I don't tend to do this, though: I usually take KDD's harder end as 5 and scale up to 9 brains. I haven't played any holds yet that I consider practically unbeatable, but then again, I guess these may very well exist!

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Tim
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back, Tim! (I know this sounds confusing )

I think the main reason that we have more 5+ holds is because lower scoring holds have more chance getting the "reject" (you know what I mean). The other main reason is that it is easier to make hard holds than it used to be.

As for difficulty, I have no problems with KDD being rated at 5 brains, because I don't think the hold is easy. I use 6 and 7 for holds I still can complete, 8 for holds that are too frustrated to complete, and 9/10 for the impossible ones. 1/2 and 3/4 are used for really easy holds, and holds that are easier than KDD respectively.

From my experience, I see that some players with CaravelNet are still picking 5 or lower brained holds. Therefore I think keeping the current 1-4 scoring is important.

As for your question about lowering the difficulty of KDD, I don't think that's important anymore, since everyone already rates the holds based on they think anyway. The current ratings already reflect on what the voters think nowadays. Did you know that some AE holds actually drop about 1 point in both scores in the last few years?

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Banjooie
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So I was playing DDR.

And noticed there was a scale of feet, and this weird sorta pentagramish chart where it explained WHY the song was hard, where it'd have a different reason like 'chaos' or 'air' at each point and this little blob would point at them or not be anywhere near them, etc.

I don't know, I just felt like being completely offtopic or something.

mrimer
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Dugan's Dungeon Revisited is entirely on-topic!

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zex20913
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Banj's...totally unrelated comment got me to thinking.

Maybe we could have a spider ranking--six categories of difficulty (off the top of my head, lynchpin; timing; precision; scripting; element combination; and overall)--and have them displayed as spokes on a wheel of radius 10, in various colors. We could have the architect rank each of those in their own opinion as well, and overlay the public's reception (again, different colors), so we get the additional insight of seeing some of the thinking behind the architecture.

Not that this would alleviate the cause--it'd probably end up compounding it--but it'd look cool, even if we do have to retroactively apply it.

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Rabscuttle
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Holds should have five possible rankings, each represented by a letter:

C: 1-10
R: 0-5
S: X or Y
T: 0-10 (with halves)
N: a-z

agaricus5
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zex20913 wrote:
Maybe we could have a spider ranking--six categories of difficulty (off the top of my head, lynchpin; timing; precision; scripting; element combination; and overall)

I think deciding on categories might be as difficult a problem! My six would be manipulation (how much you move monsters to specific places), attrition (how much skill ou need in defeating and managing monsters/hordes), specificity (how precise your moves need to be), lynchpin (how easy it is to see the room's solution), handicap (how the rooms constrain how you move) and overall. I like the concept of script difficulty, but I'd find that hard to judge as a separate category; I'd boil it down to a combination of how the script controls your movement plus how hard it is to manage the monsters the script produces.

Rabscuttle wrote:
Holds should have five possible rankings, each represented by a letter:

C: 1-10
R: 0-5
S: X or Y
T: 0-10 (with halves)
N: a-z

Is there a pattern there? For some reason, I am interpreting your post as a logic/word puzzle of some form.

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Jatopian
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I think we should leave categories and such to detailed reviews. It's a decent thought, but we'd end up not agreeing on the actual categories and it wouldn't be retroactive, et cetera.

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eb0ny
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There is no point in introducing a new scale so late. How would all the existing holds would be handled? If they are given score based on their current ratings, then ratings become misleading. If they are zeroed, then rank structure breaks, making Bad Evil Restaurant on par with MeDROiD Echoes.

What if the current rating system is kept AND more detailed ratings are made available via reviews, just as Jatopian suggested? Reviews could be handled like in GameFAQs: each review has a title and overall score (difficulty/fun, so that it contributes to overall stats for that hold). The reviewer would be able to pick his own criteria and put them in the end of the review. Of course there should be some general criteria a review should meet, but this one is one sticky thread away anyway.

This approach is better than a strict set of criteria because
a) it allows creative people like Chaco write essays on the subject and people like me to use more structured text,
b) not all holds can be rated on the same scale (what's handicap rating of Magic Show?) and
c) there will not be problem if we ever want to change the criteria, making the system flexible.

TLDR version: Jatopian's idea + GameFAQs' implementation.

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[Last edited by eb0ny at 02-13-2009 02:18 PM]

lopsidation
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Why can't you just, I don't know, read the Holds board topic and see what people have to say?

Oh, right. CaravelNet users don't get levels from the Holds board. They download them in-game.

Well, why don't you just let CaravelNet people read and post to the Holds board topics from in-game? It would be like ebony's review system, but simpler.

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Jatopian
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Simpler yet, have a link to the thread in-game, as we do on the Holds page.

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Rabscuttle
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agaricus5 wrote:
Is there a pattern there? For some reason, I am interpreting your post as a logic/word puzzle of some form.

No there isn't. Or Is THERE?!?

no, there isn't.

I don't think a more detailed rating system is needed. The two numbers give you a rough idea of what to expect and the architect also supplies a short and long description of what is in the hold. And of course other players' posts in the hold threads.

calamarain
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There is also the fact that in general... I think holds are getting harder.

Consider this - there are a lot more elements in TCB - more possible interactions... and a lot of the holds are made by people who are good at the game, or at least experienced with it.

When you become very good at the game, sometimes you lose track on what an average difficulty room is. Especially what would be solvable by a new player. I find this myself - I've made rooms that I can solve trivially... because I know how to solve them. Other people had hell trying to solve them, and the rooms just weren't fun.

Of course this might just be my perception.

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Pinnacle
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Warning: Rambly and only semi-coherent post ahead.
DROD, in general, gets exponentially more complex with each release. So most 'modern' holds are harder, on average, than most 1.6 holds. The current scale isn't even adhered to by a lot of people on the forum[citation needed], and the scale naturally evolves.
Note that Perfection was given an architect rating of 9 brains, as was Beethro's Teacher. BT is considerably harder than Perfection, but they were given the same rating. This is because BT effectively shook up the perception of just how hard a hold could be. I was probably going somewhere with this -- I might have even had a decent point to make -- but I have to get to class.

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Twice (adv.): Once too often.
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[Last edited by Pinnacle at 02-17-2009 09:52 PM]

Jacob
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How about, in addition to the x/10 difficulty score (which we generally acknowledge should no longer use KDD as the 5/10 mark)... how about we have caravelnet generate the number completed/number played score. (e.g. 23/500)

This could work as quite a useful measure of overall difficulty, and does not require a subjective judgement or a reference point (like KDD=5).

Admittedly there are two reasons this score would be low - either the hold is difficult or the hold is just so awful that no-one who started it wanted to complete it (although the community is full of optimisers and completists, so don;t know how often this happens).

Another downfall might be if most of the hold is very easy, but has some very hard sticking points.

So it's not foolproof, but when used in conjunction with the overall hold rating and player comments could be very useful.

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Hoff
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In addition to what Jacob said, CaravelNet seems to have all sorts of information. A room with a high average number of deaths would be hard. Or maybe a room with a high seconds per move is hard.

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[Last edited by Hoff at 02-19-2009 04:05 PM]

Syntax
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I really like Jacob's idea (at least as an extra stat for each hold).

Other thoughts with regards to Hoff's ideas (and I could be wrong here):
Death counts won't be submitted to Caravel as only victory demos are. Timing counts are truncated at 2 secs per move so can't be used as a valid measurement.

calamarain
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Returning to this topic... working on an AE hold has given me a thought on this...

I don't think that holds are becoming more difficult in themselves...

I think that holds are becoming more *complex*, which leads to difficulty. There are a lot of elements in TCB. This is a good thing as it leads to variety. It's a bad thing in that they can all interact together in one big mix, and it's hard to work out what's going on.

In a typical AE room, you might have say... tar, snakes and a goblin. Understandable, comprehensible, even with a force arrow or two.

In a TCB room, you might have mud, oremites, a Slayer, broken orbs and pressure plates. There are so many ways that these can all interact that even if a puzzle is not harder in absolute terms, there are so many more possibilities to explore that it becomes harder for the player to solve it.

What we need is... more simplicity. Use the TCB elements - they're great! But not too many different ones in a room, especially those that add a lot of complexity very quickly like Oremites - use these sparingly and without too many other elements.

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slimm tom
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calamarain wrote:
What we need is... more simplicity. Use the TCB elements - they're great! But not too many different ones in a room, especially those that add a lot of complexity very quickly like Oremites - use these sparingly and without too many other elements.

Here, have a few points. This is exactly what I've been thinking. More simplicity with less elements. In my opinion the point of a puzzle is better proven with cleverness instead of complexity.

noma
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One of my favourite phrases, that is probaby good advice in all aspects of life, applies to the elements included in a hold room: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

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[Last edited by noma at 03-17-2009 12:36 PM : clarity]

Dischorran
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noma wrote:
One of my favourite phrases, that is probaby good advice in all aspects of life, applies to hold building as well: just because you can, doesn't mean you should.

So now we need *fewer* architects?

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noma
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Oops, should have been clearer. I didn't mean "just because you can build...": more like, "just because you can include it..." Basically: think twice. Another good bit of advice.

The spitemaster
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I think that the hold rating is coming up against a wall. Just the wall is not their spread, it is that you can't rate something over 10. If you raise the top rating to fifteen the problem should work itself out. The top ones will raise themselves higher and the low holds will remain where they are. I think that this is because some people feel bad about giving out ones on any sort of ranking.

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CuriousShyRabbit
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I'd argue that repetition (allowing players to practice using the same concept in more than one room) is another of the many factors that makes some holds more approachable than others. It's not easy to be repetitive and interesting at the same time, though.

ErikH2000
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Jatopian wrote:
Nothing needs to change in the system. However, we need to hunt down all instances where anyone or anything posited KDD as an absolute 5 and excise or footnote them. Yes, that includes Erik Hermansen's forum posts. It's not like he'll ever notice anyway. Then we need to redefine '5' as "average".

I will too notice. Don't think I won't notice. I will.

-Erik

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Someone Else
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That sounds a little ominous.