User blog:Xingkerui/Determining difficulty based on the number of attempts?

I'd like to briefly share my thoughts on something that is discussed a lot on this forum: What determines the difficulty of a level/episode.

There's always going to be some disagreement on the difficulty of a given level or episode. For example, there are very mixed opinions about the difficulty of level 485. Some people beat it on their first try, and deem it easy, while others lost dozens of lives, and consider it insanely hard. The idea of rating this level very hard or insanely hard is ridiculous to people who found it easy, but rating it easy would be just as ridiculous to those who struggled with it. If it were rated considerably hard (the "average" of the two), no one would be happy.

This makes it clear to me that the number of attempts a single level takes cannot be the only factor in rating its difficulty. I beat level 547 on my first try, but level 548 took me five tries. However, if I only played level 547 once, do I really have a good idea of how difficult it is? Could I really argue that it's much easier than level 548, which would be the opposite of what most people think? I'm sure some people beat levels like 394 and 410 on their first try, thought "well, that was easy" and moved on. I, on the other hands, was raging on those levels for days.

If a level takes five attempts, does that automatically make it considerably easy or medium? Surely how well you do on each attempt should be a factor as well. Even though 540 took me more than ten attempts, I came close to beating it every time, so I didn't consider it that hard. Dreamworld level 272 took me only four tries, but I didn't even come close on my first three.

However, what if I told you that there were two levels, one of which took me four attempts, and the other took six. On the level which took four attemps, I came very close to winning on my first three. On the level which took six attempts, I didn't even come close to beating it on my first five tries. You'd probably think the first level isn't so bad, but the second one must be quite hard, right? Well, it turns out that the first level I mentioned is the pre-nerf version of level 655, which was one of the hardest levels in the game, and the second level I mentioned is Dreamworld level 366, which most people found to be easy.

I'm sorry that this is so long, and I've asked far more questions than I've answered. I just hope that people who suggest difficulties for levels/episodes can think about the difficult they suggest carefully, and not just say "well, I did this on my first try, it must be very easy!" Determining difficulties can't be an exact science, but I guess what we can do is let everyone express their opinion, be respectful, and try to reach a consensus based on everyone's opinion.