Rocks'n'Diamonds

Difficulty rating for each level! One person might find a specific level easy while another might find the same level hard but something very generic like this should suffice:

1 star- simple, can be done easily by new and younger players
2 stars- easy, a little thinking required
3 stars- medim, new players might find it tricky, veteran players should find it ok
4 stars- hard, may take veteran players some time to figure it out
5 stars- all those ridiculously hard levels can get this rating

The idea is so people can have a rough idea of the difficulty before they play the level. Perhaps a newbie is fed up with all the hard levels and wants to find an easy one; or a casual player might want a challenging level. The rating system would allow them to find one they want quickly without having to go through them all and play them to find out.


The other suggestion is to display a % or a progress bar on the main menu for each levelset. e.g. say the player has completed 5 out of 10 levels the progress bar would be half full. This gives players something else to work towards.

What do you think?

This goes hand in hand with level compleation status which has be discussed I think. It's in the to-do list, probably.

And an indication of whether or not one has solved a specific level before would be nice. Not all levels have scores. Surely this has been mentioned before, right? It'd be useful if you skipped levels in handicap mode.

About your idea: who would decide what level gets what rating? There are thousands!

Nathan H. wrote:About your idea: who would decide what level gets what rating? There are thousands!

The author themselves when they design the level. It wouldn't matter if a level didn't have a rating it would be a nice feature for future levels; or if authors really want they could go through their own and assign a rating.

The ratings would vary from person to person, though. There still would be nothing consistent to go by. What about all those people who make impossible levels? Would they even rate them?

Still I like the idea...

I think this is a good idea. The rating should then be done by the players (for example, by automatically asking the player after a finished game) and should then be sent to a central rating server over the internet by R'n'D. This way you would get individual ratings for single levels as well as combined ratings for whole level sets (from the single level ratings, or also by "rate this level set" ratings).

There could both be ratings for "difficulty" and for "fun" (or whatever you would call it), as there could both be very simple or very difficult levels, independently of players rating them as "good" or "bad".

Another point is that levels can be hard in either of two ways: Action or Logic (Maybe both!) but that would just complicate the idea.

Has anyone here played Enigma? (http://www.nongnu.org/enigma/)? It has a difficulty rating that depends on a few things: intelligence, patience, dexterity, knowledge and speed. Each of these are out of 5 (except knowledge is out of 6), where 1 = easy/basic, 5 = difficult. Then something is done to give an overall difficulty out of 100.
I'd like to see a similiar ratings system based on what the level contains: if it's action-based, timed (not necessarily literally), puzzle, how likely you are to fail (e.g. if you accidentally destroy an emerald), etc. Then make an overall rating from that.

As for ratings, Engima has them obtained from player rankings. Maybe RnD could have a similar system?

Sorry I couldn't provide more info. I can't find the section of Enigma that describes how the level ratings are calculated. I'll keep looking.

I'm not aware of a rating system... I like that game though.

There's definitely a public rating system - right click a level and you'll see it.

Good game though, excellent time water. (Not that I have time anymore with uni.)

The rating could be an average of all ratings submitted. That way, one grumpy user wouldn't be able to just put ultra-difficult, really bad, cause everyone else being honest would balance it out.