Inspired by this thread, and many others:
Is it even possible to definitively sort Doom WADs by difficulty?
There's a lot of weird cases! If we can we remove all the variables, how close can we get to an "objective truth" from such a subjective question?
I've been obsessing over this for literal years and finally had to make an account here proper to talk about a possible implementation I've been brainstorming and get some feedback before I go ahead and throw down a lot of effort in possibly implementing it.
First, an overview:
There are many reasons why a general vibe of "difficulty ranking" would be helpful for players, newcomers and long-time players alike. But there are two big challenges to this that seem to pop up everytime this thread or something like it comes around:
- Difficulty is very subjective! What I find tricky and what you find tricky could be entirely different! Maybe you excel at big arena fights more than the average player and have trouble with cramped slug-fests. Maybe I'm the exact opposite! How could we derive a comprehensive(ish) difficulty tier list with this in mind? The classic way around this is more of a "single source of truth"-style list like here and here. These are an excellent starting point, but I'm curious if we can decisively solve this (or at least get as close to a possible objective rating).
- WADs tend to have varying Ranges of difficulty which muddies the water as to giving them a "fixed" rating. Something like Plutonia is considered to have a much smaller range and much more consistent difficulty across the megawad than Scythe which the earlier levels are considered much easier than the end. If, out of a scale of 10, a megawad starts at a 2/10 and linearly gets harder until it reaches an ending at a 8/10... would that be considered harder than a megawad that starts at 5/10 and ends at 7/10? I can see a good argument either direction.
This isn't even getting into that everyone's *individual* scale tends to, well, scale differently. What does a 5/10 in difficulty mean to you? I know a guy on Youtube that ranks megawads on a letter grade scale (F => A+). So much granularity! We might want to isolate this variable as much as possible.
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So, my theoretical method of attack on this problem would be to utilize Wisdom of the Crowd for getting a universalized difficulty output. If you aren't aware, we can roughly summarize WotC as "the more people contribute a guess, the closer to the truth you can get after averaging the guesses together". From here, I see two implementations:
WAD-based -- Get a selection of wads in a database to compare against each other. Have either a website or application (maybe launcher?) that simply asks which of two megawads, chosen at random, is more difficult. Individually, this isn't going to mean much... but with enough combinations, overtime we'll get closer and closer to workable "truth" of difficulty. From there, we can derive a list. Yay!
Potential problems:
- There's 30 years of WADs out there! That's a crazy amount of combinations! We'd want to start small with our selection if we want to have any chance of getting workable data.
- This doesn't actually do anything to solve Challenge 2-- wide difficulty spanning megawads might still have weird spikes and we wouldn't have a great way to showcase a WAD's range of difficulty.
And the other much more ludicrous, but devilishly tempting option:
MAP-based -- Same method as WAD-based, but with individual maps instead! Sounds absolutely crazy! What we would end up with is a ranking of difficulty relative to each individual map regardless of the megawad's origin. What makes this so enticing is this method being a great shot at solving Challenge 2. By referring to the Decile of each individual map, we can get a lot of juicy data about the megawad as a whole. We can find the hardest map, easiest map, and truly get a range of difficulty across. For the statistical sickos out there, we can even plot it out! See which megawads are more spiky or smooth in their difficulty curve.
Potential problems:
- I mean, Holy Hell! If we aren't careful, we're raise our combinations factorially! We'd want to start REALLY small.
- Scale! I mean, how many people are really willing to contribute their rating? There might not be a "time-limit" for collecting this data, but I have no idea how many people would be interested in something like this to begin with. Is it enough to actually start seeing the mythical Wisdom of the Crowd effect in action? This might even already be true with the WAD-based implementation. Who can say?
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Looking Ahead:
Both of these could theorectically be extended with new entries, but get more and more complex with each new WAD added. If we're cracking "subjectivity" apart to get closer to an objective ranking, there's also the idea of tackling other questions alongside the "difficulty" one. Potential additions include:
- Which is longer?
- Which is more fun?
- Which is more aesthetically impressive (prettier)?
I also have an idea for a custom-launcher implementation where, should you not know/remember a wad or map, you can quickly launch directly into it to jog your memory. Kind of a DOOM level-randomizer, but with a crowdsourced data gathering bit on the side.
Conclusion:
The idea that "What would be a good next thing to play if you're a beginner/expert/master player?" and "Let's make a list of megawads from easiest to most difficult" keep popping up over the years shows that there's some kind of yearning for an answer we haven't really reached yet. Who knows, it might not be possible to get a satisfying enough answer, but I think it could be cool to try! Any insight or thoughts? Maybe seeing something I'm not? If I whipped up something small, would you be willing to test for me?
TL;DR:
Can we definitively get a ranking of difficulty for Doom megawads? It might be really tricky, but with enough contributions we might be able to get really close. What are your thoughts?
