Board Thread:Wiki Running/@comment-24323080-20150918232805/@comment-25022025-20150922074941

Imamadmad wrote: If this feature is going to stay, I think it would be a good idea to have a category for it, which may be hidden in the short term as we figure out how these things work. If anything, I am very much in favour of using these hexagons to help inform the difficulty discussion, as it's finally an objective measure of difficulty, based on cold hard data. It would be interesting to see if King releases any complete and real-time list of "hard" levels, or even if there could be some API query that we could access to automatically detect if the level is "hard" by King's definition.

Also, if the levels are based on win:lose records, I can't imagine they would change much over time. In fact, the more data King receive, theoretically the more stable the result as each new win or loss will have a smaller impact on the overall ratio, meaning that as time goes by the levels defined as "hard" will stabilise.

Does anyone know the win:lose ratio this feature is based on? It would be helpful to know to inform our decisions.

It all depends on whether King.com includes players who use boosters in their statistics. We have a policy of grading difficulties of levels without the use of boosters, which I think is fair, whereas the king.com statistics might just be levels where boosters don't help much, and levels which are hard but where boosters help quite a lot might not be listed. Also if it's true that the hexagon levels change over time, people might be more likely to use boosters on hexagon levels and that might also cause the win/loss ratio to change. You could even argue that people will be more careful and determined on hexagon levels, and that that might cause the win/loss ratio to change over time.

So although I think hexagon levels can be used to help assess difficulties, they can't replace our difficulties, also since there's only "hard" and "not hard", with some levels marked as "not hard" actually being pretty hard according to our community. I think we should definitely include whether a level is a hexagon level in our articles since it's interesting and noteworthy information, and have some kind of policy like considering upgrading levels to "somewhat hard" if they are marked as hard by King, but other than that I don't think this new feature should be too revolutionary.