Renaming the difficulty levels?

[irrevenant]

I keep reading that new players are finding the core campaign frustratingly hard on Normal. Sure, they're making foolish newbie mistakes, but we want them to grow beyond that, not give up in disgust.

As a not-so-long-ago (and kind-of-still) newbie myself, I suggest the following:

Rename the difficulty levels - make them "Normal", "Challenging" and "Very Challenging" rather than "Easy", "Normal" and "Hard". I think this is probably more consistent with the difficulty levels in other games.

[gryphonlord]

Hehe I agree. I've tried playing on Normal, and I beat tDH on Hard, but most are tough enough on easy. And I've been playing for about a year now. Not that I'm that good, but still. It's kind of humiliating to be defeated by the 'Easy' opponents.

[bruno]

As a counter point, I suggest renaming the difficulties
"Beginner", "Easy", "Normal" and "Hard".
Where "Beginner" should be beatable by the AI (except
for levels with oddball victory conditions), at "Easy"
a player with some experience should be able to advance
from any scenario no matter how little is carried over
from the previous scenario, at "Normal" good players
who have carried over reasonable resources should be
able to do good enough to be able to continue advancing
most of the time without needing to replay a scenario,
at "Hard" even a good play may need to replay the
a scenario after significantly poor luck or a significant
mistake.

Again, we don't need to repeat the silliness of commercial
games. I don't like their phone home features, nagging
registration programs, ads and general lack of support
(there have been some exceptions of the support issue).
We don't need to include their feel good use of words
that don't correspond to the actual difficulty. I don't
object to some explanation of what the difficulty levels
mean since that will be useful for people working on
scenarios as well as players of the games.

[irrevenant]

Again, we don't need to repeat the silliness of commercial
games.

We can chuck silliness like phoning home, registration and ads. But players expect consistency in the difficulty descriptions. Whether they're silly or not, the descriptions used in commercial games are the defacto standard. Use different ones and you send the player into the game with false expectations.

The fact that you believe the description levels need to be explained shows how unintuitive it is when you ignore the naming standards. I think that explanations of what the difficulty levels mean (through mouseovers?) would be helpful, but they certainly shouldn't be necessary.

I like the idea of 4 levels (I definitely think there should be one before the current 'Easy') but addition of a new difficulty level would be a mammoth task, and probably isn't achievable in the short-to-medium term. I also like the difficulty levels you have suggested, but I would call them "Easy", "Normal", "Challenging" and "Very Challenging".

[bruno]

Again, we don't need to repeat the silliness of commercial
games.

We can chuck silliness like phoning home, registration and ads. But players expect consistency in the difficulty descriptions. Whether they're silly or not, the descriptions used in commercial games are the defacto standard. Use different ones and you send the player into the game with false expectations.

We don't have to follow the difficulty naming convention
used by commercial games. If we have a difficulty level
of 'Beginner', and someone new to TBS games starts
out on 'Normal' and has problems they are going to go
back and figure out that maybe they need to start over
on an 'Beginner'. (Someone that thinks their a quick study
might try easy.) It's not like once you pick the wrong
difficulty level you are stuck at the level for the rest of
your life.

The fact that you believe the description levels need to be explained shows how unintuitive it is when you ignore the naming standards. I think that explanations of what the difficulty levels mean (through mouseovers?) would be helpful, but they certainly shouldn't be necessary.

That isn't the reason. The probelm I am trying to fix is
the current inconsistancy in difficulty accross campaigns.
This has become even more relevant since I have
volunteered to fix up TDH. I think having some objective
targets to shoot for will help campaign designers get
their campaign's difficulties more in line with that of
other campaigns.

I like the idea of 4 levels (I definitely think there should be one before the current 'Easy') but addition of a new difficulty level would be a mammoth task, and probably isn't achievable in the short-to-medium term. I also like the difficulty levels you have suggested, but I would call them "Easy", "Normal", "Challenging" and "Very Challenging".

Well it's not achievable before 1.0, if that's what you
mean. I think it is a significant task, but doable. I have
already put in 4 levels in the test version of TDH. As
I rebalance each scenario the extra work from having
another difficulty level isn't going to be that great.
It will seem like a bigger hit to campaigns that are already
reasonably balanced.

[dtw]

Speaking of silliness
what is with
the
overuse of new line
s
in your po
sts?

[Temuchin Khan]

Actually, to accurately reflect the experiences of a new Wesnoth player, the difficulty levels should be entitled:

Impossible
More Impossible
Most Impossible

[Cuyo Quiz]

I'll raise a "size of the reply window too small so i press enter to keep it tidy" with a "mIRC taught me to chop my arguments so i could start saying things when i wanted and not be out of context".

[scott]

Challenging is a subjective term relative to each player while hard is an objective term. Our problem is that we can't trust easy, normal, or hard to be objective. I personally dislike the asymmetry of adding a fourth level to various campaigns. We have standardized to 3, and it doesn't change the actual difficulty in doing that, just the difficulty resolution. Making a distinction between 'beginner' and 'easy' is a task we don't need to take on. Now that the game is stable, it should be easier to create objective measures of difficulty like bruno has done and apply them to the official campaigns. I think much of the problem is that most players feel offended that they need to start on 'easy', but is that really the project's problem too?

[Temuchin Khan]

Actually, to accurately reflect the experiences of a new Wesnoth player, the difficulty levels should be entitled:

Impossible
More Impossible
Most Impossible

Arbitrary
Cruel
Vindictive

And I'm only half joking! This is what Wesnoth can be like for a new player! Which is why I suggested half a year ago that Tale of Two Brothers should be a mainline campaign. What's the point of making a campaign suitable for beginners available only on the campaign server?

[turin]

As a counter point, I suggest renaming the difficulties
"Beginner", "Easy", "Normal" and "Hard".
Where "Beginner" should be beatable by the AI (except
for levels with oddball victory conditions),

Currently, the difficulty level "Easy" is supposed to be a level that the AI can defeat (after a human codes the AI parameters) without recalling any units. (Since you can make the AI do what you want with [target], [leader_target] etc AI tags, even levels with somewhat strange victory conditions can be won by the AI).

IIRC, Darth Fool has done a bit of work to make HttT conform to this standard, but none of the others do.

[irrevenant]

I'll raise a "size of the reply window too small so i press enter to keep it tidy" with a "mIRC taught me to chop my arguments so i could start saying things when i wanted and not be out of context".

Possibly he composes it elsewhere and emails it to himself? I do that sometimes (though generally I remember to tidy it up when I post).

I don't think "Easy"and "Hard" are any more objective than "Challenging". To the new player, "Hard" would be more accurately called "very, very hard", while easy would be called "possibly achievable". Conversely, I'm sure there are freaks out there who find "Hard" fairly easy.

Unless you want to go with meaningless labels like "Difficulty #1", any description of difficulty will be arbitrary, 'cos how difficult something is is, itself subjective.

Exceptions:
* "Normal" is objective, 'cos it essentially means "the baseline"
* "Medium" is objective 'cos it just means 'the middle option'

[scott]

Or name them after what kind of player could be expected to succeed at each level. The definition is built into the name. So you would be back to 'beginner' 'veteran' and 'expert'. However, it would be challenging to go below beginner without being insulting.

[DavidByron]

I think the difficulty levels need to be standardised more. Currently it's all defined by the campaign designer. There doesn't even have to be any choice, let alone the same name or number of levels.

My impression is that campaign designers have one difficulty level they test better than the others and then try to make it easier by giving the enemy less gold or giving the player more time. In some cases there's practically no difference in difficulty between the levels on some scenarios in some campaigns.

Does ANY other game out there do difficulty levels this way? Don't they usually change global values that make any scenario automatically easier or harder? Stuff like globally making the units cheaper or more expensive for the AI at different levels? Or globally changing the human units' chance to hit? Or make it so on "easy" when your leveled or special units would otherwise die reduce them to just 1hp. You could make easier levels give extra gold or extra experience to all units in the recall list between scenarios in a campaign. Ideally you want some bonus that won't prevent a beginner from getting the feel of how much danger certain tactics are - that's the trick. But if you could come up with a few global changes like that you could make the game a lot easier to play at a lower level with minimal effort on the part of campaign designers.

[quartex]

Each campaign designer can choose whatever names they want.

That's why I use "Normal" "Challenging" and "Hard" to indicate that the player should start on the lowest difficulty level. I admit that Challenging and Hard are rather similar, I probably should use different descriptions.