While we're at it, why does the difficulty rating bar even exist? Let's remove it, it looks out of place.

To be honest, I agree with Isa. It's not like any of us can't read numbers. (This is your chance!)

Nah, I'll get rid of the bar when I take down the difficulty ratings and replace it with the new ratings.

Btw guys, I made a very important edit to my post at the end of the last page, so you should go back and read it.

I don't trust you, Livio. All because of what you posted in the chatbox. Knowing my luck, I'll probably see a bunch of 69 smilies and that's all.
EDIT: Well, I'd be darned...

I hope that you mean that my proposed system of difficulty levels shall be implanted then.

yeah, I even updated the Edited Conclusion

livio, seriously why change something that works well. leave the system as it is....i'd say even without the words. if you see a 7.5/10, you don't need to also read 'good' to know that...

I oppose some averaging of different numbers system. There are far more factors than fun, difficulty and "quality" (whatever that may mean). For me originality has always been one of the most important factors, design being another.
And these factors don't weigh equally either. Fun will always be the most important factor for any game and should weigh far more heavily than the other factors.
There is also the problem that the different factors aren't independent. A level that is too difficult won't be fun either. A simple /10 rating is far better to show how much a person enjoyed playing the level.

I oppose the balanced difficulty rating too. The point of the difficulty rating wasn't to show the quality of the difficulty, but actually show the difficulty itself. If you wanted a difficult challenge you could look at the difficulty ratings and pick a level with a rating of around 4. Likewise, if you just wanted to relax and pick a level you could breeze through, you would pick a level with a rating of 1.
Not to mention the balanced difficulty rating is completely pointless. People are able to determine themselves if they like a level with a difficulty of 3 better than a level with a difficulty of 5. With the added description the difficulty rating already had it isn't people would think that 5/5 - Impossible would be a good difficulty.
And there is also the problem that people prefer different difficulties. Shos would give a 4/5 difficulty level a balanced difficulty of 5/5 and a 3/5 difficulty level 4/5, while Dando would do the exact opposite. The current difficulty rating gives a far better view of the quality of the difficulty than a balanced difficulty rating would.

Whoa, so you're just going to conclude that the system needs these additions overnight, before some people can even come online?

I've been reading a good portion of the arguments for expanding the system, and I thought I'd respond to them.

I disagree with this entirely. "6 out of 10 for fun rating" doesn't let me know where they're coming from, their actual review does. As a cave maker, I can assure you that I don't care about how they form their rate, I just care about specific feedback. Giving us extra things like whatever you were suggesting doesn't help me understand what I need to improve. The most important part of a rate is the review, in my opinion, and there's no reason to take emphasis away from that. The rate itself should just be a basic summary of what you think of the level.

If someone wants to show us how they came upon our level's rating, they can do that in their review. Why do we need some other special feature to convey that?

It basically sounds like, "Lets throw out the difficulty rating, and split up the overall rating into difficulty balance, and fun"

I see no reason to get rid of the difficulty rating to make way for this new system, where the rating part around difficulty doesn't tell you if it's hard or easy, just if its balanced or not. You're trying to revolutionize something that is perfectly fine as it is. You have better things to do, like working on the Aeon Demo.

I think what angers me most though is that you guys pretty much decided that you're going to change this, while I was asleep. If you had 3 pages of arguing in like 6 hours, maybe the decision won't be unanimous, and you should wait an entire day before coming to a definite conclusion

Well, I read the 1st page, 2nd page, skipped the 3rd page, and read this page. Like Quirvy said, let those who were dreaming about a gunfight in K-mart while you guys were arguing have a chance to respond to this before you make a decison.

You guys are right for the most part, the levels system needs a bit of reform. Here are my stances.

I see no need to get rid of the difficulty ratings, some players do actually pay attention to them. If you guys really are that strung out about the difficulty concept, I say this: make the system start with easy and end with hard. Easy is easy, hard is hard. I don't see why we need anything beyond that. Some players like to play slightly hard levels, or pretty easy levels, but can be decieved into thinking a level is not worth playing if they see a "evil" or a "very easy" on it. By making the rates more simplified, this'd almost get rid of the evil  so called evil difficulty. A cave isn't evil unless it displays actual evil traps. None of that has really been brought up at all, so it may not be revelant.

For the problem with too many high rates, I'd hate to say it, but some people just don't rate levels well, they need to learn that just because a level is good they do not have to automaticly give it a 9.0. I don't really see any forseeable way to fix this, unless either we restrict certain peoples rates which'd be unfair, or we do the 3-rates-to-make-legit system. That also has problems, I'll use the example of a moderatly hard cave, which not many people beat. Lets say though, that Shos and Ckjr beat it and both gave it high 9.0s. Nobody else wants to try the level, but Shos and Ckjr deserved to rate it, for they beat it, so I worry, that not enough people will feel they got far enough to contribute to the offical rate, or people will blind-rate, or look-at-the preview-image-rate (a major problem) and bring down/bring up the official rating very inaccuratly.

I say we probably should start to change some our more ****** up rates, and try to make them more reflect todays ideas. We need to teach people to utilize the numbers 3-7 in the rating system. Usual good/bad rating end up on the polar opposites of the level.

Multiple different ratings, (fun, quality, effort into making etc.) there are too many factors. Perhaps make and optional system in which you can either rate a level normally or, you can fill out all these rating boxes and they'll average out for you (The Kittikiyana-cave-rater-o-matic, lol).

As for making this decision overnight without more opinions of active Interguildians

Think this decison over, this idea is about as radical as the internet-wide database idea, so we need time for several more members to offer input. Atleast edit in a non-outcome-deciding-just-opinion-reflecting poll.

hmm, nothing was really final. The edited conclusion was more like a log of what the current idea was, not a final decision. And I changed the way level rates look more because I was experimenting with how they looked.

And I like Yaya's idea of simplifying the difficulties into Easy and Hard. But I can't but help feel that we should split them three ways, for Easy, Normal, and Hard, because there are just some levels that you would neither call Easy or Hard. The Easy levels would be difficulties of 0-1.9, Normal would be 2-3.4 and Hard would be 3.5-5.

And there may have been some confusion in the conversation. The current idea was to have one main rating, and two side ratings for difficulty and fun. These ratings have nothing to do with each other at all, or I mean they don't go together to make one big rating or anything like that.

Easy 0-1.9
Normal 2-3
Hard 3.1-5

That seem good enough?

hmm, I guess that's better. I don't know what I was thinking. i think I was trying to build that idea around the way the current difficulty ratings are broken up into. Because many levels that are a low "Challenging" probably deserve to be under Normal and not Hard.

Also, people have been saying that they see absolutely nothing wrong with the current system, and I thought I outlined it pretty well in the blog post:
that's why I added the titles like Good, Great, and Amazing. I added them last night mainly b/c I was experimenting with the way the design would look, but since I've added it, I've noticed myself thinking of rates under a different standard. I remember I used to use 7 and 8 ratings interchangeably like there wasn't much of a difference, but now because there are titles attached to them, I have a much clearly definition in my head of what makes a 7 cave or an 8 cave.

And the main reason why I started writing the post was because of the recent conversations and arguments that I linked to at the start of the blog. They got me thinking about the way that we manage our rates. The problem is that they aren't reliable many times. And about half way through the blog, I said that any system we come up with will be inherently flawed. So maybe instead of relying so much on one system to display good levels, we could come up with multiple systems to show good levels, like having a "Most Fun Levels" list, and an "Award Winners" list, and "Homepage-Featured Levels" list.

we need to improve the way difficulty ratings work. I was trying to come up with a new design for how they look when I figured that I really didn't like the way it was set up.

I have a couple of ideas:

(1) We could change rename each of the different ratings you can give out. Right now it's 'Very Easy', 'Easy', 'Normal', 'Challenging', 'Hard', 'Evil'. I was thinking Very Easy and Easy are redundant, and perhaps we could merge them. Then move everything down? I guess the rating would be more of an indicator of how hard (as opposed to how easy) a level is.

(2) Or we could just simplify the whole thing. Just let people say if a level is Easy or Hard. Maybe it could be like the karma rate system, where you only vote plus one or minus one for difficulty.

(3) Going off of the simplified idea, perhaps we could let people vote three ways: Easy, Medium, Hard. I guess we could make it a vote out of three as opposed to out of five, and we could also let people vote with decimal places like we do now.

You know, I'm liking that last idea the most and I bet you are too. These ideas have been mentioned somewhere before, but I can't remember where or who initially brought them out, so sorry for not giving people credit. Of course we're gonna have to figure out how we're going to convert all the old rates into the new standard.

That seems like a surprisingly efficient system. Especially as the difficulty rating doesn't need to be as exact as the quality rating. A basic easy/medium/difficult rating would probably work quite well. Option 3 gets my vote.

Easy, Medium and Hard sounds fair to me. How do we convert the current rates? 0-2.4 for Easy, 2.5-3.9 for Medium and 4.0-5.0 for Hard is my suggestion.

I think just calculate the rate's percentage out of five, apply to to three, so that you get a corresponding number between 0-3.

so:

([rate]/5)*3 = new rate out of three.

On second thought, easy/challenging/hard might be better names, with the cut-offs being at 2.4 and 3.9.

0.0-2.4 = Easy
2.5-3.8 = Challenging
3.9-4.0 = Hard

doesn't look so elegant. And besides, if it's supposed to be out of three:

0.0-1.4 = Easy
1.5-2.8 = Challenging
2.9-3.0 = Hard

I'm still not liking it much. Although the decision to rename Medium to Challenging.... maybe.

2.5-3.9 and 4.0-5.0. Who cares if it doesn't look elegant?

Also do mind that was how to convert the current rates into a three-way system.

I didn't see the decimal thing. I thought you meant that you simply pick from Easy, Medium and Hard as ratings instead of a numerical rating. Like the karma system, only with 3 options instead of two. I was merely suggesting how to convert the current ratings.

oh then I misread his post. I thought he was saying that the 3-point system was to be organized into the three names by those numbers.

but you know, you're right. That probably is a better way to convert the rates

Yeah we should probably do that, since like you said, we don't need much accuracy for difficulty

If you don't like the numerical difficulty ratings, the easiest way to remove it is to replace it with a difficulty drop-down consisting of the current difficulty names.

Easy/Medium/Hard seems like too few qualifiers to me?