Suggestion: Schizophrenic Difficulty

The current picture is a crude looking insane difficulty chart. It does make its point clear, but I think a cleaner picture from an actual work would look and work better.

Ross's Game Dungeon has a video on The Chosen: Well of Souls, a game with a ridiculous difficulty spike in level 3 that then drops back to easy after a long annoying gauntlet. In the video, he shows this nice looking chart (It's here, a little past the 30 minute mark).

I think this would work pretty well. Thoughts?

edited 14th Apr '17 6:42:30 AM by Elbruno

The suggestion is miles better from a pure aesthetics aspect.

Got to agree. on the suggestion.

The suggestion certainly gets my vote.

That's practically Difficulty Spike. Or at least, that's what it looks like. The difficulty spikes up for a short amount of time and then comes back down, making the graph look like it has a bunch of "spikes."

Also, yes, Difficulty Spike concerns the last part of the game, where the first part was pretty easy and then it gets extremely difficult. My point is that the graph has literal (contrast with the trope) spikes in the difficulty.

edited 14th Apr '17 8:07:45 AM by WaterBlap

Pretty sure Difficulty Spike only happens once and dictates how the rest of the game plays out.

OP is good.

I don't think the suggestion is good at all. It just says it's extremely difficult in the beginning, and after that pretty much consistently has easier sections between harder points.

The current, on the other hand, is much more clear on that difficulty isn't something you can count on any way you slice it.

What do the different colors in current represent?

Difficulty modes? There are usually three of "easy," "normal," and "hard," which seem to correspond to green, red, and blue at first but then the labels just go completely out of the window.

The current one is utter bosh. You can't have loops and back-curves like it has. Even if we don't use the suggestion in the OP, the current one needs to be replaced with a graph that at least looks plausible.

The suggestion has tilted lines, which isn't possible either, but the difference is that it's presented as a real graph, rather than as an obvious parody of how the difficulty is. The impossible lines are part of the joke.

Huh? The suggestion in the OP has no lines that tilt back. Angled lines are entirely possible, as are straight up-and-down spikes, assuming that the vertical axis is difficulty and the horizontal is segment of the game, or time into the game.

The spikes on the middle and latter part of the graph clearly tilt to the right, which means the line has to go down and to the left, which is impossible in a real graph.

However, that suggestion presents itself as a real graph, rather than something that would make people go "wtf?", so it's inappropriate to have an inaccurate graph. The current presents itself as a mindscrew graph, so it not being mathematically possible only adds to how well it illustrates the trope.

I don't see that tilting to the right you're mentioning; those spikes look really straight to me, and whatever tilting to the right there could be is minor and clearly not intended.

The problem with the current is that it's exaggerated, but not in a clever way. It comes off as just "lol random".

Also, the suggestion is not illustrating a Difficulty Spike (those are a game getting hard and staying hard), nor it's showing a game starting hard and then getting easy. This is a game starting easy, getting stupid hard suddenly in an early-ish stage, then suddenly going back to easy again, with occassional bouts of less intense BS. That sounds pretty schizophrenic to me.

edited 14th Apr '17 1:39:43 PM by Elbruno

You're talking as if "lol random" isn't allowed to be an accurate description of the difficulty.

The suggestion also has a clear and relatively consistent pattern of difficulty after that initial spike. Which is directly contrary to the trope. I don't think it's a good idea to have actively misleading elements in an image.

The trope does not require complete randomness in the difficulty. It's when the difficulty pattern doesn't make a lot of sense — in the suggestion, the earliest difficulty spike is nearly twice as high as any of the others, and it lasts far longer. That's distinctly schizophrenic.

There's also a difference between "lol random" as in "doesn't make a lot of sense to do it this way" and "lol random" as in "can't possibly be the way the difficulty in this game graphs out (and looks like it was drawn by a four-year-old, to boot)."

Well, I've already established that the suggestion can't possibly be the way the difficulty graphs out, so I'm not sure why you only have that requirement for one image but not another.

Current is trying to be a parody. It works fine as such imo. Plus my point of the pattern of spikes wasn't really addressed. Plus plus the fact that there's a clear pattern in the suggestion, suggesting that this is when the difficulty spikes and then gets easier and then spikes again — basically for boss fights only. Suggestion is weaker than the current imo.

You know, that's a good point...those spikes could be interpreted as boss fights, so that weakens it as a demonstration. Still, the current crosses a point of silliness that doesn't make it work for me.

That goes for me, too.

That''s what I assumed they were — individual boss fights.

edited 15th Apr '17 6:20:52 PM by Madrugada

I think it's pretty clear the spikes after the first are boss fights. The schizophrenic part comes from how the earliest spike is significantly longer and harder than all the next ones, and that's after the game started easy. Even the boss fights look pretty inconsistent in difficulty, with the easier ones being near the end.

"This happens when a game has a difficulty curve that makes no sense." - Schizophrenic Difficulty

The current image makes no sense. There's no rhyme or reason to it. It's perfect! Meanwhile, the new suggestion, after the initial difficulty plateau, has a clearly defined pattern of not difficult followed by relatively difficult, which goes against the very spirit of this trope.

My only pet peeve with the current image is the axes, which are kinda weird, with "TIME" being CAPSLOCK ON while "D Ifficulty" is lowercase, but has a capital I, leaving it with one too many capital letters. /end Grammar Nazism

edited 29th Apr '17 3:05:59 PM by eroock