NOTE: The whole point of the Development Updates forum is to bring potential site enhancements to the community to collect feedback. I can't guarantee every feature will be implemented or everyone's request will make it in, but I'll strive to include as much feedback as possible. If a feature makes it beyond the "idea" phase and I start working on it, I'll provide updates here, as necessary.

This was mentioned in another thread, but it's something I have on my radar to complete in the next month or so and I wanted to create a separate thread to discuss it.

The goal here is to allow users to select what they feel the difficulty of a particular game is, so this statistic will be tracked at the GAME level, not the GAME WITHIN MY COLLECTION level, if that makes sense. In other words, it'll be tracked at the same place that the rating is tracked.

I haven't totally settled on what options to provide for the difficulty selection, so I'm certainly open to feedback on that. For now, here's what I'm thinking:

• 1 - Cakewalk
• 2 - Easy
• 3 - Just Right
• 4 - Hard
• 5 - Punishing

To enter the difficulty for a game, you would click on a dropdown / text / icon or something near / under the rating stars in the Quick Edit modal. The difficulty you've entered would then be displayed near the rating stars on the Collection Search page in a smaller font so you can see it right on your collection. Much like ratings, if you haven't selected a difficulty, nothing will be displayed.

On the Game Details page (i.e. the page that aggregates data across all users for a game), there would be some visual indicator (maybe a graph or a colored bar, like the Stats page?) that would break down the difficulty values that have been entered for the game.

All of the above would be phase 1, which is the bare minimum to start collecting and visualize the data. Once we're all settled on that base functionality, I could see adding a filter to the Collection Search page so you could quickly find the games you have or have not entered a difficulty for (much like the existing rating filter). Additionally, I think it'd be cool to have a difficulty filter on the Game Search page that would search against the aggregated difficulty rating.

Good idea, albeit that the actual rating is somewhat subjective and personal so i'm not sure how reliable the actual score is in the end. I'm missing 5 (between hard and punishing). Perhaps also add an indication for which difficulty level you have entered the score. I often play on easy just to get through a game because of the story, and skip the often bad fights. That's an easy playthrough but does it make the game easy? So not really sure i'll will use it myself.

Oops, sorry about that, I originally had 7 levels and chopped it down to 5 and must've poorly edited the numbers :P

I didn't think about the idea of entering a difficulty level that you played the game on, but that's a really good point. I'm torn on whether it should be entered when you select the difficulty you thought the game was or when you enter a completion. It's a tricky data point since games have wildly different difficulty levels and it would probably need to be a textbox so you could type in whatever difficulty you played on. I agree that if you played a game like Dark Souls on Easy (not even sure that's an option, but we'll pretend it is?) and therefore mark the game as "Easy" difficulty, that's probably not accurate. But at the end of the day, it's a very subjective rating to begin with and given enough data, I think it would normalize out. And if not, at least you could quickly find the "easy" games in your collection for when you want something to breeze through :D

It's definitely a subjective thing, since people will have different ideas of what constitutes "hard" and "easy." A game that takes 1000 hours to finish completely could be considered "hard" to some even if the game is about as challenging as a Sesame Street speak-and-spell, simply due to the endurance required. At the same time, someone who doesn't care about time taken will mark it as easy since it required no real skill outside of patience.

I haven't really decided yet one way or the other how I feel about associating difficulty with completions or not, but I'll leave some thoughts on pros and cons with the idea.

Associating difficulty ratings w/ completions:
+ can specify the difficulty you did the run on in details, so people could see the context of what you considered easy. "I played on Nightmare difficulty"
+ can rate multiple runs of the same game depending on game settings. "This was a barbarian run. This was a crusader run. Etc..."
- More difficult to implement an easy way to view? Especially in light of having more than one rating due to several completions. Maybe need to average out a user's completion scores if there is more than one?
- Buried under a layer of functionality that not everyone uses, unlike basic editing on the collection page.

I'm sure there's other pros and cons I could think of, but I just got back from an all-you-can-eat restaurant and I'm gonna go pass out from a food coma for a while. :P

Some of you may have noticed this already, but I FINALLY implemented game difficulty tracking this past weekend. As of right now, all you can do is enter how difficult you thought a game was when editing it in your collection or when you enter a completion (these are the same places you can edit a rating). Just like ratings, the difficulty selection is tied to the game itself, not the "copy" of the game in your collection. So if you have 5 copies of Super Mario Bros., you only rate / enter difficulty once for it.

If you've entered a difficulty for a game, you should see a colored icon in your collection, assuming you're using the List view. This is sort of a sneak preview for the game badges idea I had, though I'm not sure if / when those will ever surface.

If you go to the Game Details page, there's a chart that shows the difficulty breakdown, pretty basic stuff. I'm going to create a custom theme so the colors for each difficulty match the icons that are shown on the Collection page, but it's surprisingly not an easy change, so it's a little lower on the priority for now.

Eventually, I'd like you to be able to search for games with a certain difficulty, but for now the only filter on the site is on the Collection page so you can find games with / without a difficulty (just like the one for ratings). I'd also like to add a section to the Global Stats page to show the most / least difficult games on the site.

Let me know what you guys think! Oh and I'm not married to the names I chose for the various difficulties, so if anyone has any better ideas, let me know!

I've added some difficulty ratings to a handful of my games to check it out, looks pretty good moho_00!

My only critique at this point would be the icons themselves. I find they're a little too varied, that is to say there's no cohesion between them to indicate that they represent scaling difficulty ratings.

edit: If I had to offer a suggestion as a replacement since you're using glyphicons, I'd rather see something similar to the ratings where you use the same icon repeatedly to indicate scale. Perhaps different coloured stars? Or a new icon entirely like say, the skull glyph (Maybe a 3/5 rating would be three skulls followed by two interpuncts? Or middle dot, whatever you want to call 'em)

I was a little worried about the icons, to be honest :P I threw them in at the last minute and struggled coming up with 5 different ones. I think your idea of showing the same icon makes more sense, though I'm not sure which one to use (I know you mentioned the skull, so maybe that one?)

Not sure what glyphicons you have access to, I don't think the skull I was looking at is included with bootstrap by default, but as long as you stick to one symbol that isn't too out of place it ought to be fine.

I know with the rating system you had the benefit of two related glyphicons that could be differentiated between, but I don't really see anything else like that in the default bootstrap set of glypicons. Fortunately, there are still a lot of options for displaying the data though!

1) I know I suggested using symbols and interpuncts: o o o · ·
2) Or maybe colours/ contrast? (can't show this without alt-codes, think of similar to stars used on site already)
3) Or simply display the icons with nothing trailing o o o
4) Numerically 3 or 3/5
5) Text Cakewalk! Brutal! etc...

Text plays well with others, too.

1+5) o o o · · Just Right!

Hope you enjoyed my terrible examples, haha. If you want consistency with what's there for ratings, I'd go with option #2 if you can do something with dark/light or colourful/drab to differentiate.

I'm a fan of option #1 just because I like interpuncts (and using the word interpunct if you can't tell!) but will probably take a bit more space formatting depending on how well text and glyphicons play together. Especially if you did a 1+5 combo. Even better if you continue to use colour to indicate scale of difficulty.

blue -> green -> yellow -> orange -> red is a pretty standard scale for 5 items as you're constantly adding "warmth" from lowest to highest.

edit: Well poop, apparently I can't use the majority of alt-codes with this font. Using generic letters will suffice I guess for now, lol

edit #2: I'd love some kind of optional context field where I could add a blurb to justify my rating. I know I've mentioned it before, but now that ratings are in, it's really gnawing at me that I can't say why a game is 2/5 etc... Even if it was restricted to only being small enough to indicate which in-game difficulty I'm rating, that would be super duper helpful.

Just in case you're curious, these are the icons that I have readily available: http://optimisticdesigns.herokuapp.com/landerv2/html/component-icon.html

I'll try to tinker with the layout and maybe post some mockups before I commit any code.

Regarding the context field, that might actually play into another idea I had. I'll post it here in just a minute, so let me know if you think the two could be merged. If not, I think having a short text field for difficulty info makes sense, much like how you can enter a note with completions.

Oh hey, that's a nice list of options you've got with that set. Heck, three different skulls even if you wanted to go that route, haha. (skull1 better than the others imho, especially since the solid fill would work well with colour schemes.)

After giving it a lot of thought, I'm of the opinion that the difficulty rating system would be best served if it was tied to completions/playthroughs, and not the game itself. Won't get used as often, but at least with completions you'll be able to rate different difficulties of the same game across a number of playthroughs. I think the functionality will be more robust this way.

Ideally, I'm thinking of a 1-5 rating like there is now, and a small comment field for: "Game Difficulty Setting/Play Mode" where you can enter to provide context for that playthrough. If you don't want to add another optional text field to the completion interface, then people can always mention it in their playthrough notes as a fall back that won't require any additional work on your part.

Not relating to difficulties, but since we're talking glyphicons, I'm wondering if it's possible to implement their use in things like forums posts, notes, etc.. the way say, you can link icons in steam chat, or twitch chat with ? Asking purely out of curiosity (as someone who is crap at coding,) not a feature request, haha!

So, I know the last post on this topic was a while back, but I had some questions about the difficulty scale. I like the current difficulty scale, as each point is pretty easy to understand (except maybe "Just Right") but I'm wondering why Rating goes from 1-10 while Difficulty only goes from 1-5. I feel that difficulty is probably at least as granular (if I'm using that term correctly) as rating, if not more so. I can think of at least a couple times where I wasn't sure if the difficulty of a game was 3 (Just Right) or 4 (Hard), as the difficulty seemed to be somewhere in-between the two, and a similar case also came up for games with a difficulty between 2 (Easy) and 3 (Just Right): They still had some level of difficulty (It wasn't super easy) but it didn't seem like medium "Just Right" difficulty either. I read quite a bit about rating scales online, but it doesn't seem like there's one optimal solution for rating scales; Instead, it seems that "whatever works best for your users" is what people recommend. If you're curious, Quora has a 48-answer discussion about the alternatives to 5-star ratings (link). 10 points seems like it works well for ratings so far, at least for me, so maybe 10 points will also work for difficulty too, but I'm not totally sure about that. Any thoughts?