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Doomkid

Sorting Doom WADs by Difficulty (Charts are fun)

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There is also this @dew's graph that actually works pretty well and better than just saying a wad has x difficulty imo.

*sweats at the thought of having to re-do the same chart for like the 4th time now*

 

But.. The fact is, that kind of chart would probably be the best way to organize WADs by difficulty. It's likely to get a bit messy with like 100 points plotted on it but I still feel like it coveys the most information, the easiest. Perhaps this in tandem with a simple "list style" chart that I'm working on will be the best of both worlds.

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20 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

MMmmmm RJ_SLOTH

 

U are definitely detached from social dogma 🤣

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As a relative newcomer, I was overwhelmed by the huge amount of WADs and not knowing where to start. This thread, and some others which I have linked below, were hugely helpful in giving me a starting point. I decided to rate the WADs on a 10 point scale of difficulty, based on all the posts in these threads. I assigned a score of 1-10 for every wad mentioned by every poster, and then took an average of the scores. 

P.S. Apologies for bumping, for I didn't feel this post warranted a separate thread

Edit: Updated the list as per rd.'s recommendation

    

 

  

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Edited by paturn

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Good start. I'd push Scythe 2 and SF3 higher, and pull Combat Shock 2 and 50 Shades lower, just because errors in that range carry more weight (if a 3 is really a 4 or 5, no big deal; but if a 7 is actually higher, that can lead to someone playing woefully unprepared), and those four are somewhat misleading.

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Nice job. Although I do think some wads may need adjustment. I would push Eviternity one step lower (as it is roughly in the same league as the BTSX wads) and push Scythe one step up.

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The problem with Scythe is the last 10 maps are way harder than anything before it. The average difficulty rating of the WAD gets skewed by the relative lack of difficulty in the first 20 maps.  This is something that was discussed in the other threads as well.

 

I agree that Scythe should be higher. It would be more appropriate the rate the WAD's difficulty as per the last 10 maps.

 

I admit that this list is far from perfect. The difficulty rating may be misleading in a lot of cases. This is because I tried to compile them from different threads in which people used uniform scales. For example, I personally don't think Sigil belongs in the same category as Plutonia. 

 

It would be helpful if we ask everyone to rate WADs from 1-10 on a single thread and compile the average difficulty score.

Edited by paturn

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Nah, I think they should be judged as a whole, not just the few final maps as such results can never be conclusive.

 

Otherwise, it's a good chart, though I agree with rd that the SF3 and CS2 in psrticular should be adjusted slightly.

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That's a fair point. I think the best we can do is ask members to rate them as they see fit. In theory, the average score should reflect the collective wisdom of the community. 

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We can choose 2-3 popular WADs representing each difficulty level, which can then be used as a reference point to rate other WADs. 

 

Something like (just an example)

 

1. Doom, Doom 2
2. TNT Evilution
3. Memento Mori, Memento Mori 2
4. Plutonia
5. BTSX 
6. Alien Vendetta, Hell Revealed
7. Speed of Doom
8. Hell Revealed 2, Scythe 2
9. Sunder, Sunlust
10. Archvile Jump, Chillax

 

Such an all inclusive list will be helpful to players of all skill levels. A 10 point scale allows for smaller increments of difficulty and we humans are used to grading things from 1 to 10.

 

 

Edited by paturn

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Will include some of my .wads as well.

 

I'm too young to die: Twilight Zone, Twilight Zone 2, Death Tormention

Hey, not too rough: Whispers of Satan, Zone 300, Icarus Alien Vanguard, DTWiD

Hurt me plenty: Doomed Space Wars, Unhealthy (a map with no health), The Ghoul's Forest 3, Akeldama

Ultra-Violence: Eviternity, Scythe II, Crusades, Sigil, wow.wad

NIGHTMARE!: Sunder, Hell Revealed, Nuts

Edited by pcorf

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It's very tricky to rank wads in terms of difficulty without a significant degree of subjectivity - after all, what's easy for me might be hard for you and vice-versa. It's a fun exercise though, here's my take with several of my personal favourites:

 

2fEhVuT.jpg

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On 12/9/2020 at 11:04 PM, pcorf said:

NIGHTMARE!: Sunder, Hell Revealed, Nuts

Hmmmm... Honestly i don't think we can put Hell Revealed on the same level as Sunder. Also, Nuts is a joke wad.

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17 minutes ago, DimLight said:

Also, Nuts is a joke wad.

 

3 minutes ago, AtticTelephone said:

So?

 

It's also really easy. Unless we're talking about a true UV-Max run where all the cyberdemons are killed, which is impossible because there isn't enough ammo. In that case, it still doesn't belong in the same tier as HR and Sunder because those wads are beatable.

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6 minutes ago, Pseudonaut said:

 

 

It's also really easy. Unless we're talking about a true UV-Max run where all the cyberdemons are killed, which is impossible because there isn't enough ammo. In that case, it still doesn't belong in the same tier as HR and Sunder because those wads are beatable.

The cyberdemons are excluded from the kill count for UV Max, which makes the map pretty easy in my opinion 

 

 

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The post looks incomplete and abandoned but some comments helped me a lot (thank you all)

The post seems forgotten but its still relevant, and i think its important.
 

Difficulty becomes a factor when there are wads that has a LOT of monsters in 1 room, or those impossible room x 100 monsters wad that you can only beat in 1 specific way, and bullsht room traps, or unfair situations unless you explore the map pixel by pixel
 

I have been playing the really easy ones with UV -fast and the hard ones... carefully on UV ,':^) im still a noob.

Now Imagine a library of every wad with tiny features as recommendations like those: (RD for Recommended Difficulty)

Wod.wad: [Very easy] [RD: Nightmare] [RD: fast UV] [joke] [2000]
wadie.wad: [IZI] [Blind] [fast UV] [UV] [pistol] [mod] [2010]
Wadada.wad: [Hard] [Fair] [Blind] [UV] [Pistol] [classic] [1998]
Wad.wad: [very hard] [Memorize] [unfair] [1000 monsters 1 room] [2004]

waaaaaaad.wad [nearly Impossible] [braindead] [unfair] [hated] [1 million monsters 1 room] [new]

 

Tags voted by experimented fans to help newbies and other players that want to practice specific skills.


That way with TAGS you can rate / sort /filter them in a search library death machine, people can find what they want and avoid challenges they are not prepared or don't like. 

Edited by Vino

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On 8/10/2019 at 7:59 AM, Ancalagon said:

 

Spoiler

image.png.7bb018015fad7485ea6722f6adf47a71.png

 

There is also this @dew's graph that actually works pretty well and better than just saying a wad has x difficulty imo.

Incidentally, now that this thread was dug up again and I saw this mockup chart, there's a convenient way to do this by slapping labels on a Desmos graph, like so. Infinitely zoomable so clarity will not become an issue, and all people need to do is to provide X and Y coordinates between -100 and 100 for the maintainer. Not volunteering to do this, mind you, just pointing out the possibility :P

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I'm glad this thread is resurrected, because I'd love to see such a chart. I've been using the mentioned thread, WAD Progression for Skill Improvement as a guideline to getting into custom wads, but by design it has only a few represent skills levels that are viable for me for the time being. For instance, I've been playing Valiant, and while it's not punishingly hard, I sometimes find myself wanting for just a tad more casual (but quality) WADs to smoothen my rate of improvement (... why does this sound silly :-D).

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The problem with something like this is every WAD has its own difficulty curve. I find Ancient Aliens map 28 harder than certain Sunlust maps, for example. Some wads start off easy and get much harder, some are more-or-less consistent throughout, some have a sawtooth pattern where each episode "resets" the difficulty, but climbs higher than the previous episode.

 

If I wanted to make a ranking like this I'd have separate ratings for the "average" difficulty and the difficulty of the hardest map(s). There's a pretty large gap between the first 20 maps of Sunlust and the last 3...

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I do think an “average difficulty” and “peak difficulty” value for each wad would be great. Some wads do spike notoriously despite being tame overall, this would let players know to expect the spikes at some point before being tossed in the deep end.

 

RHhe82, that thread inspired the initial idea behind this one. I thought it was a great idea, but if n a sense a crying shame to see 0.1% of the good Wads made over the years being represented in the lineup. I basically want a version that could infinitely expand, allowing players to “forge their own path” through wads and through the process of getting better!

 

Ruiasu, hmm, good to know, thank you for linking that - will probably be super helpful for this little project.

 

Vino, tags seem like an excellent idea for multiple reasons. I really wish it would be possible to go back in time 20something years and introduce that convention because it would have made wad sorting, by difficulty and other factors, so damn much easier over the years..!

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Regarding wads with significant difficulty leaps at the end, a fun visualization for this would be some sort of graph that shows the difficulty of each map over the whole wad, so we can see the whole "difficulty curve".

 

Don't have a mockup offhand because im lazyposting on my phone, but there's a fun idea for someone I guess because graphs are cool. :p

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The way I'd probably approach this is with excessive abuse of Google Sheets, now that I think about it. Give selected community members a tab on the sheet only they can edit, where the columns are interpreted as follows:

WAD | MAPXX: Map Name | Difficulty | Rating | whatever else you might want, with an agreed upon scale of course.

Another, not directly editable tab would automatically collect these individual map results and average out their scores, letting viewers sort the huge maplist by all the given parameters. Then, a final tab would take those results and calculate the stats for full WADs.

 

I believe it's possible to setup Sheets so that the approved curators can then just rate any and every map they can think of, and the aggregation will automagically do the rest. If the map names are kept to a standardised format, it might even be possible to calculate correlation coefficients for difficulty and map number, giving a score for how the difficulty scales with map number. Secret levels make a mess of that, though.

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1 hour ago, Xaser said:

Regarding wads with significant difficulty leaps at the end, a fun visualization for this would be some sort of graph that shows the difficulty of each map over the whole wad, so we can see the whole "difficulty curve".

 

Don't have a mockup offhand because im lazyposting on my phone, but there's a fun idea for someone I guess because graphs are cool. :p

 

There is this thread, where he rates each map individually:

 

 

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I don't understand why so many people overexaggerate Hell Revealed's difficulty. Yeah, it can be a bit tougher than Plutonia, especially if you attempt pistol start in each level, but honestly, having played both wads, I have an easier time with Hell Revealed since there are multiple ways you can tackle the big wave of monsters that you'll get in some of the levels, whereas with Plutonia, despite most of the levels having a body count below 100, you still face tough monsters in compact, cramped areas and must fight them in order to progress further, which can be really nasty for the unprepared, plus I found Resistance is Futile to be slightly manageable than Go 2 It. And HR is far tamer than the bigger, badder wads like its sequel and Sunder. Here is my ranking of the Doom wads by difficulty (Easy being the lowest, Nightmare being the highest):

 

LEVEL 1: EASY

Doom/The Ultimate Doom, Doom 2, Hell to Pay, Perdition's Gate, Icarus: Alien Vanguard, The Twilight Zone, Death Tormention 1 & 2, Demonfear, Project X, Raven series, Fava Beans, BF_THUD!, Revolution!, Slaughter Until Death, The Evil Unleashed

 

LEVEL 2: MODERATE

TNT Evilution, Master Levels for Doom 2, Obituary, Memento Mori 1 & 2, Requiem, The Trooper's Playground, The Enigma Episode, Eternal Doom, STRAIN, Death Tormention 3, 2002: A Doom Odyssey, Whispers of Satan, Doom Core, Reverie, Eternally Yours, Jenesis, JPCP, Khorus' Speedy Shit, SIGIL

 

LEVEL 3: HARD

The Plutonia Experiment, Hell Revealed, Alien Vendetta, Scythe, THT: Threnody, TNT Revilution, Valiant, Hellbound, One Bloody Night, 3 Heures D'Agonie 2, Ancient Aliens, Survive in Hell

 

LEVEL 4: VERY HARD

Speed of Doom, Plutonia 2, Plutonia Revisited, Kama Sutra, Hell Revealed 2, Scythe 2

 

LEVEL 5: EXTREME

Deus Vult 2, Swift Death, Resurgence

 

LEVEL 6: NIGHTMARE!

Sunder, Sunlust, Chillax

Edited by T-Rex

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On 8/10/2019 at 5:41 AM, DoomSpud said:

Scythe 2 in Medium?

Madness.


Perhaps they didn't play till map23 and onwards? I guess it's kinda hard to rank a wad that is for the most part smooth sailing with some really tough difficulty spikes later on.

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