Is there any way to know how difficult each of the games are to solve?

Maybe we should add a field which authors can fill out when submitting a game? But then how would you classify difficulty, as an author possibly isn't the best judge of the difficulty of their own game?

Alex wrote:Maybe we should add a field which authors can fill out when submitting a game? But then how would you classify difficulty, as an author possibly isn't the best judge of the difficulty of their own game?

I'm not sure how to judge difficutly either. I saw that this site: http://www.rinkworks.com/adventure/index.cgi had difficulty rateings and wished that we had them here too.

I suppose there could be some kind of formula that took into account:
x = number of rooms to explore
y = number of objects you have to find (ex: 1 for finding the sword + 1 for finding the key)
z = number of actions you have to do (ex: 1 for using sword to kill giant + 1 for usng the key to open the door the giant was guarding)
w = number of distractions (objects and actions that get you nowhere)
v = number of ways that you can loose (kill yourself or otherwise make the game impossible to win)

These are just some ideas and and I don't have a suggestion of how to weight the diffuculty level.

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Another option is to set the difficutly level dynamically.
As people play the diffuclty level would go up or down depending on how many commands it took them to solve the game and how many people got killed and how many people gave up. Maybe the author could set a default diffculty level as a starting point or every new game could just say "diffuculty unrated". It we went this route, then the diffucult rating should probalby also say "based on # number of plays" or something to that effect.

I don't know how hard any of this would be for you to implement.

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The more I think about it the more I like the idea of starting with "diffucutly unrated." If authors want to give it a quick score they can play the game once themselves. Knowing the solution, the diffuculty rating would start relitively low but it would be a baseline and as more people play, it would get adjusted.

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I just think that a lot of people prefer easier games and others prefer harder games.
And a difficulty level would help people choose which games to play.

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I'm brainstorming as I write this:
I see that the games have star ratings based of reviews. The reviews could ask the players to give a difficulty rating and that rating could be listed as a seprate statistic from the stars.

Thanks for listening to my rambling.

lelo