Monsters and skill levels

[peach freak]

IMO this is a very overlooked aspect of Doom mapping. And quite frankly, I suck at it. If you were to play one of my maps, there's little to no dropoff in monsters going from hard to easy skill levels.

When I'm thing placing, sometimes it crosses my mind saying "Wow, this would be totally egregious on easy skill levels!", so I would adjust the monster difficulty flags as such. But this only comes in short bursts for me.

How do you go along configuring this task with monsters? Do you take a hard-to-easy approach or an easy-to-hard approach?

[Phobus]

Hard-to-easy most of the time. Other times I literally make each difficulty have an entirely unique Thing placement scheme. If i'm doing Hard-to-easy I optimise UV for my preferred difficulty levels and then just remove a few of the tougher monsters (or cut out some numbers of weaker ones) for medium and then make it so easy has about 50-66% the monsters of hard.

[printz]

I never play on anything less than hard, so I put little attention to lesser skill levels. I usually design and playtest the maps on hard. There are many instances where I place 3 monsters, which is one for each skill.

I know it would be cool to actually design and playtest maps for Hurt Me Plenty... Only little problem is that gamers are more used to Ultra Violence, and if they get to play my map in a super-buffed UV, they'll start to think that my map was designed for experts only.

[PRIMEVAL]

I actually tend to do Hurt Me Plenty first then adjust accordingly afterwards (sometimes). I hate setting difficulty and usually avoid til the very end of finishing the level, and after I start a few new levels.

[Rambosee]

Because everyone plays on UV, I design for it.

[Reisal]

When I do placement, I have more and/or stronger monsters for higher sklls and less and/or weaker for lower difficulties.