Anyone know how we're supposed to use the difficulty rating feature in reviews? I know the gameplay and deco ratings are for the quality of the gameplay and deco and the overall rating is how you feel about the level as a whole, but the difficulty rating threw me off.

I'm assuming it's the level of difficulty, 0 being auto and 5 being extremely hard.

I agree with rjinc

@rjinc That would kind of make sense, except that 1. I'm pretty sure the in-game difficulty is already displayed in the website, and 2. the difficulty gap between Firework and ReTraY is far too big to be expressed with only two significant figures.

An alternate hypothesis that I'm going to throw out here is that it's based on the difficulty of the level compared to other levels of its difficulty, but again, I'm not 100% sure.

@SolveForX314 yeah I'd increase the parameters for the rating

Anyone know how we're supposed to use the difficulty rating feature in reviews?

— @SolveForX314

It is meant to be difficulty on a static scale. Having it set the same as the other ratings was a mistake.

yeah I'd increase the parameters for the rating

— @SquawkGD

Based on how I've seen MyDemonList handle it, I think a range between 0-100 would be suitable since it leaves enough fine tuning for the community to naturally balance the scale.

Something I will make sure I cover is the ability for users to set reminders in case they want to re-balance their ratings. Difficulties in the community change over time and if I want to keep this system healthy long term I think that's something important to consider.

Another thing to note, even though ratings are 0-5 with 0.5 steps, they are actually stored as 0-10, I cannot store decimal numbers in the database unless I change it. Do you think those other ratings need their range extended too?

@Admin That might not be a bad idea; it would give users an extra sig fig of precision to work with and more carefully fine-tune their ratings.

the parameters increasing to 100 seems a great idea

I would like to propose a possible system we could use for difficulty ratings once the range is altered:

Auto: 0

Easy: 1-5

Normal: 6-10

Hard: 11-20

Harder: 21-30

Insane: 31-40

Easy demon: 41-50

Medium demon: 51-60

Hard demon: 61-70

Insane demon: 71-80

Extreme demon: 81-100

The narrower ranges for the easier difficulties are to account for how close in difficulty these levels are; likewise, the wider range for extreme demons is to account for the wider variety in difficulty of extreme demons. (My hardest is Toxin Lab III, so I probably don't have a super strong ethos on this last point, but other sources suggest that this is the case, e.g., the large number of tiers for extreme demons in the GDDP.) If you think my proposed system is absolute garbage, please tell me what changes you would make and why; otherwise, I will continue to use this system, and if you please, you may use it as well.

And until the difficulty slider has its higher range, divide your rating by 20 and round it to the nearest half. For example, if I think Violent Silence is around a 47, I would divide by 20 to get 2.35, which rounds up to 2.5.

my difficulty ratings are

0/100 if the level is easier than vam by flaaroni

100/100 if the level is harder than or equal to vam by flaaroni