Board Thread:Wiki Running/@comment-3225604-20150222122308/@comment-3225604-20150223134620

Michlen wrote: to Cons seem to be a bit more than Pros in my opinion... Creating a new difficulty between VH and IH is really complicated, since in many cases players have very different opinions, so an Extremely Hard difficulty could be too sensitive to be accepted by everyone, and it could even be abused, as discrepances between VH and IH are very often present. In my opinion, to decrease the number of IH levels, we should take a very difficult level in which many people agree it's surely IH (that will be the lowest IH), and then, decide if a level is more or less difficult than that. If it's more, then it will be IH, if not, VH. By doing this however, we'll certainly have to downgrade many "historical" IH (sorry for the repetition of "IH") ones, like 181. For example we could take as the lowest, lvl 461: probably lvls 716, 181, 819, 377, which IMO are easier than that, will be downgraded. Anyway this is just a proposal, and it could have many Cons too. In the case of 566 and 92, actually I supported 566 to be IH, as the orders are really insane and it's clearly harder than 92, which could be even rated Hard, especially on mobile, where the ingredients slide.

Right now we can't say if it is going to be abused. At first, I propose that extremely hard is a fully automated difficulty, which functions based on the circumstances given above. However, due to consideration of democracy, I let the public to decide whether the level should be upgraded to extremely hard from very hard even it doesn't fulfill any of the three circumstances. About your proposal, taking a level as a standard of insanely hard may not be too good. In my opinion, an insanely hard level should be graded under the number of moves you've used, number of combos you've used, the board shape, and the win percentage within 100 attempts. This is much better than using a level as a standard, since everyone may not have the same experience of that particular level, and it makes the way of grading insanely hard vague. Extremely hard difficulty is a good way to solve the discrepancies between people of two opinions, and I think it will help mitigate arguments between them. What is meant by abuse can be different to different people, but if they really think that it's abused, they can actually request a downgrade to very hard. In that case, it will contradict with circumstance 1 and 3, leaving only circumstance 2 reasonable. I have updated the thread to state more clearly that circumstance 2 is not a must to make a level upgraded to extremely hard, so if the users found it being abused, they can propose a downgrade back to very hard.

Also another disadvantage of your proposal is that the difficulty range within a single difficulty rating will become massive. Just as you said, level 181 being downgraded to very hard will be on par with level 92. I think the majority won't think level 92 is equal to level 181. You may also argue that level 92 will be downgraded back to hard, but then another problem revealed is that the hard rating is going to have a large difficulty range. Similarly, it will extend to very easy and we will have a bad time in dealing with this. In short, extremely hard rating is much more better to cope with this kind of disparity.