Does anyone actually play the easier difficulties?

It's 2019.  If you are making Doom maps based on the number of people who are actually going to play them ... then you wouldn't be making Doom maps. :)

1 minute ago, DuckReconMajor said:

well this is a sad way to think about things

Should of added in well designed too, but that's intertwined with difficulty. Also I was exaggerating. If the 12 people are close to you, obviously it matters more to you. 12 months of work for 12 randoms though ? Now I'm not saying the worth comes from more people playing your wad. If it's good it's good because of your effort into making it good. Do you want your effort to be played by 12 or 1200 people ? Is all that time worth it for your ideas to reach a few random people ?

Look it seems most of this comes down to - everyone does whatever they want in their own bubble.(Like I said in my first reply). There's no incentive to take advice from anyone it seems. Which means chaos rules. Which means people get pissed off in every new wad because the rules have changed.(unless specified in the txt file). I'd rather have less frustration than more, but yeah no incentive for people to change their ways.

10 minutes ago, pulkmees said:

Do you want your effort to be played by 12 or 1200 people ?

Let's be real: if your answer is the latter, you better be John Romero.

13 minutes ago, pulkmees said:

Do you want your effort to be played by 12 or 1200 people ? Is all that time worth it for your ideas to reach a few random people ?

Is this a "please play my maps" thread or the "people actually play Doom on easier difficulties" thread?

The answer for the second option has already been answered 3 complete pages ago.

Oi, I'm one of those play things on normal persons. Even IWADS! Also to:

4 hours ago, Cynical said:

given that no one is looking for PWADs until they've beaten the IWADs

I am a counterexample to this claimed for all. I was playing mods around the time I picked up doom. I used cheats in games as a child, didn't care. For Doom, I didn't actually finish any Iwad until Doom Classic Complete on PSN. Which was 2011 or something, and I played on "baby," I am terribad at gamepad fps play. Didn't complete RDoom on hard till years later in EE. Just checked, it was 2017. Same year I finally beat Final Doom, and on normal no less. Didn't get doom till around 2004; the Doom 3 re-release. Did the same thing with most pc games with mods, took till college till I actually played thing purer, and that's due to DCC, chocolate, and getting annoyed by fan patches to popular crpgs. Still tend to go to mod stuff before I finish a game though, if it's levels and non-intrusive. I was playing modules for Neverwinter Nights before I eventually pulled my hair out playing the banal OC.

I tend not to play on baby or nightmare, because that really messes me up. I get too used to half damage if I play it too long.

My thing with creation is that end-user and creator should respect one another, but that's just lofty buzzwords. I don't like lillith.pk3, but I think it is art. I really like Jenesis, BTSX, and Fruit Salad, but I never managed to finish any of these. Got burned out with Tower in the Fountain of Sparks by level 16, couldn't get past either of level 27 or 28 of Jenesis, which @Jimmy is broken in EE, but I managed to fix it, and never finished the last level of Fruit Salad. Still enjoy them, might get back into them some day.

I think difficulty placements are a nice luxury, not a right. Also preserving the artistic vision is nice. I actually got annoyed by the removed cybers in Sigil myself. It's fine though. I will play things till I am no longer having fun, but if I like it I might try again, that's the respect I'll try to give the creators. And I'll cheat to look at stuff, but that's not playing the set, but quicksaving is not cheating! Save scumming, maybe, but I only save when it's safe, break of the action thing anyway. I also keep enter level saves, if I screw the pooch, I can just start the level from how I entered it, or even pistol start if I have to, most maps are designed around it anyway.

I've not much experience as a level developer yet, but I did get slightly irked when I saw @Lingyan203 play my Keen set (which has not been updated on the keen wiki, and I don't know who to talk to about that) and use God mode to get optional goodies. Maybe I borrowed too much from id's playbook there with the bs, but it's optional, I didn't think anyone would need cheats or would try to max a one hit point game. But that's the way I think I'd design doom maps, not for uv-max, but the way I play. I'm sure he had his reason, and I'm really glad that he played through my levels, it's great to see that level of feedback, now if only I could get someone to play my Wolf3D level.

And that's something I find interesting, the spectrum of difficulty. For example Keen Galaxy: Keen 6 is easier than 5 or 4 on hard, but harder than 4 or 5 on easy. At least for me. I beat 4 and 5 saveless on easy, but only managed to beat 6 vortstyle (no in-level saves) on hard. I'd say 6 is narrower in difficulty changes than the other two. I think Plutonia is kind of like that compared to other IWADs. But that's not a bad thing at all.

I've always felt like RDoom was built around normal difficulty, look at all those stuck monsters on hard, heh.

Oh, and revenants are low-tier enemies, change my mind.

my god, can we have a single fucking thread about difficulties that doesn't immediately devolve into a cyclic argument about "canonical" difficulty levels?

I feel I've read the same arguments at least 4-5 times now, and it hasn't become any more involved in the last.

44 minutes ago, pulkmees said:

Look it seems most of this comes down to - everyone does whatever they want in their own bubble.(Like I said in my first reply).

HEY GUY, WITH THE OPINION! YEAH YOU! SCREW YOUR OPINION! Let’s get our torches and run this heathen outta town!...

...Wait a sec, I actually agree with most of what he said on second reading. Carry on then.

34 minutes ago, Capellan said:

Let's be real: if your answer is the latter, you better be John Romero.

I don’t think 1,200 is too out of reach! Maybe 12,000 is, though.. but I’m happy to say some of my most downloaded WADs have cracked 1k downloads. I made a skin pack that’s sitting at like 10k downloads for some reason I can’t comprehend.. but with that I think stuff like Eviternity, Ancient Aliens, Brutal Doom etc has probably had many, many more.

I think over the course of a few years, as long as your wad generates some chatter and interest, it probably will be played by hundreds or maybe even over a thousand people. Heck, you worked on STRAIN - I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s been downloaded like 100k times since release!

2 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

I think over the course of a few years, as long as your wad generates some chatter and interest, it probably will be played by hundreds or maybe even over a thousand people. Heck, you worked on STRAIN - I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s been downloaded like 100k times since release!

I worked on Requiem and MM2 as well, and I sure they have even more downloads.  But they are nearly 25 years old.  If you're making a map today and you're hoping to have 1,200 people play it ... well, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting to hit that mark.

21 hours ago, Capellan said:

 

For the record, I am happy to test stuff on HNTR or HMP (though probably not both, due to time constraints), as long as it's playable in PrBoom+ and doesn't fiddle too much with the core Doom gameplay (adding a new monster or two is fine, but if you've changed up a bunch of stuff I'm probably not interested - and yes, I realise the irony of someone who worked on STRAIN saying this).

 

Well, you already "Strain"-ed yourself making that wad, so you don't want to do that when testing HNTR or HMP Doom maps. (joking)

Here's one thing I'd like to see people do when balancing maps. Remove fodder, like zombies and imps. Don't remove knights, barons, revenants, archviles...

Sometimes I just want to rip and tear with a backpack full of ammo, a soulsphere in my belly wearing the mega armour. No tactics, no thinking. Just shooting a load of rockets. But there's no point to it if all I'm doing is shooting 99 imps. I wanna gib some big things.

2 minutes ago, FractalBeast said:

Here's one thing I'd like to see people do when balancing maps. Remove fodder, like zombies and imps. Don't remove knights, barons, revenants, archviles...

 

Sometimes I just want to rip and tear with a backpack full of ammo, a soulsphere in my belly wearing the mega armour. No tactics, no thinking. Just shooting a load of rockets. But there's no point to it if all I'm doing is shooting 99 imps. I wanna gib some big things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh261nfSn3E

2 minutes ago, Master O said:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh261nfSn3E

 

It's a fine map, but there's no real scenery to take in, ifyaknowwhaimsaiyan'.

9 hours ago, pulkmees said:

Do you want your effort to be played by 12 or 1200 people ?

Imagine basing your map's worth based on popularity and internet brownie points...

Yeah I would rather have "Chaos Rule" because its less boring that way, More variety in content is always good regardless if its Easy or Hard.

2 hours ago, FractalBeast said:

a soulsphere in my belly

You don't eat soulspheres, dude. You pick them up and smash them into your face like a big-ass water balloon and all your facial injuries immediately heal.

6 hours ago, pulkmees said:

Do you want your effort to be played by 12 or 1200 people ? Is all that time worth it for your ideas to reach a few random people ?

Are you making it for you or are you making it for them? I tend to think most people make what they want to play, not what they think other people want to play.

5 hours ago, Super Mighty G said:

Are you making it for you or are you making it for them? I tend to think most people make what they want to play, not what they think other people want to play.

Both. If I think ONLY what I want to play no one would play that. I don't think that highly of anything I could do or have done. Some smoothing out is necessary. You need both sides.

I play pwads at easier skill levels because my free time is not sufficient enough to both play wads to become a better player and design them.

10 hours ago, pulkmees said:

Both. If I think ONLY what I want to play no one would play that. I don't think that highly of anything I could do or have done. Some smoothing out is necessary. You need both sides.

If what you make is good, people will play it, no need to cater to everyones needs and make a "by the book" mapset that is '"acceptable" by the mass players.

Do what you like and the rest will follow

Excuse the bump, but this is pretty relevant.

Having soured on "modern" Doom because of the high difficulty and resulting expectations of patience, I've decided I'm going to be a casual player. With that, and wadsmoosh, I've been playing through all of the classic Doom I've got on HNTR (using GZDoom, with mouse look). Obviously the original three episodes were breezy, but the escalating damaging floor usage and addition of other environmental hazards and challenges actually did make for an obvious difficulty curve still. E4 remained uneven, with the first map killing me and the two Cyberdemons in the Romero maps posing a threat. Sigil was actually a fun experience, as it's mostly environmental hazards and low armour that provide the challenge anyway. All of the Cyberdemons going from the main run of levels was welcome.

I don't have the Master Levels, but I've got everything else Doom II and derived, so I'll look forward to that and then venturing into the various WADs out there. Perhaps I'll finally see what people have seen in a lot of the popular map sets of late.

17 hours ago, Phobus said:

Excuse the bump, but this is pretty relevant.

 

Having soured on "modern" Doom because of the high difficulty and resulting expectations of patience, I've decided I'm going to be a casual player. With that, and wadsmoosh, I've been playing through all of the classic Doom I've got on HNTR (using GZDoom, with mouse look). Obviously the original three episodes were breezy, but the escalating damaging floor usage and addition of other environmental hazards and challenges actually did make for an obvious difficulty curve still. E4 remained uneven, with the first map killing me and the two Cyberdemons in the Romero maps posing a threat. Sigil was actually a fun experience, as it's mostly environmental hazards and low armour that provide the challenge anyway. All of the Cyberdemons going from the main run of levels was welcome.

 

I don't have the Master Levels, but I've got everything else Doom II and derived, so I'll look forward to that and then venturing into the various WADs out there. Perhaps I'll finally see what people have seen in a lot of the popular map sets of late.

Doom 2 as sold on GOG includes the Master Levels.

Hallo, 

Yes! I play the other difficulties. When you are new to a map/level and wants to get a better know of it the different skill levels help to get into it. 

Mfg

On 7/9/2019 at 7:06 PM, Capellan said:

 If you're making a map today and you're hoping to have 1,200 people play it ... well, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting to hit that mark.

Don't be so sure. I was fortunate enough to place 2 maps in TNT:Revilution, which currently has 4,584 downloads. That's a special case owing to the iconic status of TNT:Evilution, and no way do I believe that everyone who downloaded it actually played it, or played more than a few maps. Still, that shows a rather large community interested in this ancient but wonderful game.

How do I do on my own? It's a mixed bag. 

For the maps released on idgames, IIRC we only know how many downloads have been made since 2017, or whenever the beta downloads section went up. So, without further ado, in order of least to most and noting the original release dates;

Elfkill (2013) - 14

Elfstomp (1999) - 18

Disraeli (1999) - 20 [newer version is Map04 of Abcess]

Abcess (2017) - 34

Shotgun Symphony (2019) - Unknown, but probably higher

Realm of Chaos (1996) - 126

Those numbers look dreadful, but they don't tell the whole story. There is also the downloads from Mediafire for development versions of Abcess and Shotgun Symphony. Total downloads of all versions still on Mediafire;

Abcess - 193

Shotgun Symphony - 953

The SS numbers are quite encouraging. The most popular version received 385 downloads. A lot of players may have tried E1M1, decided they hated it, and stopped there. But one way or another, total downloads was at least within shouting distance of 1,200, and well exceeded my expectations.

While I'm being a total jackass, I should point out that I'm an Amigan. I played Doom on my dear, departed A4000T, the most powerful 68K Amiga ever released, and uploaded some of my maps to Aminet, the Amiga file repository. How well did they do there, with a much smaller audience of Doomers? I happen to know the answer! ;)

Disraeli (1999) - 368

Elfstomp (1999) - 384

Realm of Chaos (1999) - 417

The dates are for the year I uploaded them to Aminet.

If we extrapolate from the Aminet downloads to what's likely with the much larger PC Doom community, it's reasonable to suppose that idgames downloads exceed Aminet by a factor of 5 or more, but I'm guessing that only holds true for Realm of Chaos, since it's a megawad, and idgames downloaders seem far more interested in megawads than individual maps or even episodes, unless they're by a famous mapper. RoC also has 52 reviews over the years whereas my single maps average 1 - 3. So maybe the old 1999 singles hit 100 or close to it, while RoC probably shot past 1,000. How far I have no idea.

Bottom line is I've done okay, all things considered. ;)