Defaulting to Ultra Violence is terrible, and here's why

[Jayextee]

Thinking about it, I'd like to see an adaptive difficulty in a source port somehow; when finishing a map the difficulty can lower or increase based on some performance metric or other, similar to how shmups sometimes do this with a hidden 'rank'.

This might not be a simple implementation though; if, say, it were based on no. of player deaths during any given map, there'd have to be a way to record that - possibly meaning some small-scale rewriting of the savegame code? I'm not incredibly tech-minded, so I could be wrong here. It'd be neat to me, at least, even if most players (and definitely the UVbros) wouldn't care for it.

[Laocoön]

Checking back in because people have been saying this discussion has become ugly and heated, but it seems pretty civil to me.

 

The upshot for me is that the apparently generally held national that UV is the 'normal' difficulty turns out to in fact be a minority opinion. I feel very mild satisfaction as a result.

[GreenAnime]

im a masochist and love difficulty 

[roadworx]

1 hour ago, Laocoön said:

Checking back in because people have been saying this discussion has become ugly and heated, but it seems pretty civil to me.

 

The upshot for me is that the apparently generally held national that UV is the 'normal' difficulty turns out to in fact be a minority opinion. I feel very mild satisfaction as a result.

people have much lower standards for what entails a flamewar on a forum nowadays. a few people got a bit snappy, but it's nothing too bad.

[Shepardus]

3 hours ago, plums said:

I can't check right now, but Woof/Nugget have the 'skill' cheat that I thought changes the skill level when you go to the next level, even in continuous play.

That does work, I didn't know about that. Doesn't help if you're already in the level, though, so better save at the end of the previous level.

[plums]

40 minutes ago, Shepardus said:

That does work, I didn't know about that. Doesn't help if you're already in the level, though, so better save at the end of the previous level.

It also doesn't help if nobody knows about it! For such a potentially useful feature it's pretty buried.

 

Switching to ITYTD mid-level should (again, I think) give you the damage reduction and ammo benefits immediately. But then you need to remember to switch it to something else before you start the next map, unless you want HNTR thing placement.

 

(It's kind of impossible to change thing placement mid-map without a big risk of something breaking, I imagine.)

[Alaux]

2 hours ago, plums said:

Switching to ITYTD mid-level should (again, I think) give you the damage reduction and ammo benefits immediately. But then you need to remember to switch it to something else before you start the next map, unless you want HNTR thing placement.

FWIW, two months ago I added a cheat into Nugget to enable the ITYTD benefits for any skill, without altering thing placement.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

8 hours ago, Jayextee said:

Thinking about it, I'd like to see an adaptive difficulty in a source port somehow; when finishing a map the difficulty can lower or increase based on some performance metric or other, similar to how shmups sometimes do this with a hidden 'rank'.

I'd be very curious how that would work. Because dynamic difficulty is a really tight balancing act and (from what i can tell) easily snowballs out of control. 

Though, most of the examples i can come up with use that to deal with the player becoming stronger as the game progresses, which doesn't really apply with doom. You're not levelling up or getting new skills. Also, i imagine i have a bias against it for noticing when it doesn't work and not noticing when it does. 

 

9 hours ago, Laocoön said:

Checking back in because people have been saying this discussion has become ugly and heated, but it seems pretty civil to me.

It is civil. People got their knee-jerk reactions to what they imagine i was saying out of the way early on and now it's very fruitful. Based on the admittedly pretty bad title, granted.

Some of the points brought up are super interesting. 

 

9 hours ago, Laocoön said:

UV is the 'normal' difficulty turns out to in fact be a minority opinion. I feel very mild satisfaction as a result.

Yes, definitely a good thing. Though i still wonder how what people say and how they play aligns. But i guess i shouldn't worry about that. 

 

2 hours ago, Alaux said:

FWIW, two months ago I added a cheat into Nugget to enable the ITYTD benefits for any skill, without altering thing placement.

Awesome! 

[plums]

3 hours ago, Alaux said:

FWIW, two months ago I added a cheat into Nugget to enable the ITYTD benefits for any skill, without altering thing placement.

What would you think about adding a whole "skill settings menu" to Nugget Doom? Like I suggested in my last post, I feel like these kinds of things are useful enough to be more obvious to people, and it's not too far out of line with things that Nugget Doom does already.

 

It could include:

 

- thing spawns for Easy, Medium or Hard

- multiplayer thing spawns

- switches for double ammo and respawning enemies

- monster reactions set to normal/fast/nightmare (which is slightly different than -fast)

 

(You could also do some more "niche" stuff like enable thing spawns for all skill levels at once, slower monster behaviour, etc. but I don't think that's nearly as important.)

 

Especially interesting would be a way to reset the current level with the equipment you started with (when playing continuous), applying the new enemy spawn settings, which some people were talking about for a potential GZDoom mod.

 

All of this stuff could be accomplished through cheats and command-line args etc., but I feel like organizing it into a menu would be a lot more user-friendly and also more discoverable.

[Alaux]

1 hour ago, plums said:

What would you think about adding a whole "skill settings menu" to Nugget Doom?

I do like the idea, but I'd have to see how to tackle it. I guess it could be an additional "Custom Skill" item in the skill menu.

[Steve D]

Coming in late means I'll make a boring post that covers ground already well-trod, but wtf, why not blather?

 

Yes, I design all my maps for UV and all other difficulty settings are UV-lite. But it's also true that I don't design every map's UV to be at the bleeding edge of how much misery I can suffer. But when I do . . . ;D

 

I design my hardest fights to follow the "chaotic, unscripted combat with high monster density" formula. The "chaotic" part means that even though I know where all the monsters and goodies are, I still get hammered because there's just so many of those nasty buggers around that I can't keep track of where they're all coming from. I can be killed dozens of times in my own maps. 54 deaths is IIRC the most, and on that map, I despair-quit because I knew there wasn't enough health and armor ahead for me to survive the big end battle. But the next day I played it, died like 24 times, and had lots of fun.

 

It's a myth that just because you can't beat your own map in one go on UV means it's a badly balanced map. Truth is, I suck. I'm also a savescummer. I've always played that way. So to me it's completely normal to die multiple times on a hard map and still enjoy it. Sometimes I save at a really unfortunate place, and if I can't make headway after that I'll start the map over. But anyway, what I'm getting at is that many of my skilled testers have successfully FDAed my maps -- including those where I died multiple times -- and found them to be just fine.

 

As I've said many times before, if a map is too much for me on UV -- which doesn't happen often because I'm quite stubborn -- I will replay it on HNTR rather than HMP. The reasoning is that if it's way too hard on UV, I'll probably find it overly tough on HMP. So far, HNTR has always given me everything I needed in those situations.

 

I suppose that what bothers us mappers -- me for certain -- is when someone gives your map a go on UV, gets roasted, then says your map sucks because it's too hard, as if we owe them a map they can beat on UV. Well, IMO we owe them a good time or at least the opportunity for a good time. I want people to have fun in my maps. I want their pelts but I also want to make them happy. ;D  I want them to die in ways they find enjoyable. And as we all say, we put in -- and tested! -- those difficulty settings for a reason. But so it goes. There's nothing we can do about it. 

 

I reckon I'll just keep doing what I'm doing. :)

[Cruduxy Pegg]

31 minutes ago, Steve D said:

It's a myth that just because you can't beat your own map in one go on UV means it's a badly balanced map. Truth is, I suck. I'm also a savescummer. I've always played that way. So to me it's completely normal to die multiple times on a hard map and still enjoy it.

 

Honestly it isn't a myth but annoying people trying to annoy game designers just because they can. I see it all the time by people online writing stuff like (the designers can't even play their own game). That's what testers are for, designing and playing are two completely different skill sets and not everyone has them both in spades.

 

And it happens even if the designer is very good at their game! Crypt of the necrodancer devs are good at it yet mediocre players who need any excuse for their own skill issues still say the same stupid question. Can the dev even play their own game? YES  they had the speed run records for a while!

[prfunky]

I was going to leave this topic alone. But then a thought occurred to me;

My last remaining playtester for my stuff actually complained to me about

HNTR being set too easy! This was after I told him I didn't need him to

playtest that skill level. Seriously. I'm not a great player, maybe my friend

isn't but he's more skilled than I and actually plays Doom properly with a

keyboard and mouse ~ not like my dumb keyboard-only playin' ass.

 

What does this say about Doom players?

 

As a mapper, I try to set HMP at my skill level where I'll probably be able

to complete the map without dying but sometimes die anyways because

I made a stupid decision or fumbled my fingers at a critical moment.

I know I'm going to die on UV 50% or more of the time. That's why I

employed the playtester(s) to begin with.

Edited July 12 by prfunky : doubled words

[Stabbey]

It doesn't say anything about "Doom players" at all. It says something about your playtester. You cannot extrapolate from a data point of one (1) playtester to "the entire community of Doom players."

 

Possibly, it says something about the relative difficulty difference between maps made by keyboard-only players and maps made by mouse-users.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

44 minutes ago, Stabbey said:

It doesn't say anything about "Doom players" at all. It says something about your playtester. You cannot extrapolate from a data point of one (1) playtester to "the entire community of Doom players."

 

Possibly, it says something about the relative difficulty difference between maps made by keyboard-only players and maps made by mouse-users.

Something worth considering, I think is that ITYTD/HNTR is the likely difficulty somebody with a disability may choose. People play all sorts of different ways. Maybe with a controller, whether it's specialised or standard, whether it's by choice or not. These two could easily double up as accessibility options.

[fishy]

I make my maps for UV because that's how i'm accustomed to play and how I learned to play doom. IDK where it comes from really.

I do agree that it's fucked up that some "people" don't accept the way others play in lower difficulties, I've actually seen people in discord servers attempting to make fun of people that don't play in UV but most of the time they instantly get called a dumbass by a mob.

[knifeworld]

1 hour ago, fishy said:

I make my maps for UV because that's how i'm accustomed to play and how I learned to play doom. IDK where it comes from really.

I do agree that it's fucked up that some "people" don't accept the way others play in lower difficulties, I've actually seen people in discord servers attempting to make fun of people that don't play in UV but most of the time they instantly get called a dumbass by a mob.

I don't doubt that there have been instances where someone made fun of somebody for not playing on UV, and I agree that it is shitty behaviour, if it was actually intended as serious jab. Anyone that actually has done so does deserve to be called dumb, I agree.
But otherwise, what you saw was probably just soft mockery between people who all play similar wads and know eachother, like "smh didn't even UV max it!!!11one lolz"
Anyhow, was there really a need to put people in quotes?

Honestly it almost sounds like you're trying to place bait and/or fuel the idea that people are actually going around mocking others and actively complaining people don't play on UV, like some kind of UV-only gang.

This is entirely not the case, at least as far as I've seen, the only people I've heard complaining have been those worrying about how other people play a wad and over-thinking about players being stubborn and taking what Doomtubers say as gospel or whatever.
If some players are too stubborn to step down to HMP, just let them. If they ignore warnings about the hard mode being... hard, then it's their fault alone and is not some huge issue that needs fixing.

[Bauul]

On 7/11/2024 at 11:59 AM, Shepardus said:

I've seen some people say to drop the difficulty if you find it too hard, but it's worth noting that there isn't really a good way to do this if you're playing continuously.

 

I think this, combined with how most mappers put "all" the monsters on UV and fewer on lower difficulties, is what means so many people default to UV. 

 

Honestly aside from stating otherwise explicitly in the Readme or map information, there's never going to be a good way to mitigate for this in the standard way Doom plays.

 

When I released Elementalism I included two new difficulties, Medium-Violence and Mild-Violence, that was the full UV monster count but with decreased player damage & monster health. I saw far more people playing on those than I did on HMP or HNTR.

 

If a source port or mod can add a way to implement more dynamic difficulties, such as decreasing the damage taken by the player or decreasing the health of the monsters during the level, I can absolutely see people using that to mitigate the difficulty of UV more than restarting the whole level/mapset at HMP or lower.

[fishy]

1 hour ago, knifeworld said:

But otherwise, what you saw was probably just soft mockery between people who all play similar wads and know eachother, like "smh didn't even UV max it!!!11one lolz"
Anyhow, was there really a need to put people in quotes?

Honestly it almost sounds like you're trying to place bait and/or fuel the idea that people are actually going around mocking others and actively complaining people don't play on UV, like some kind of UV-only gang.

This is entirely not the case, at least as far as I've seen

That's what your experience was and that's okay, I'm giving my experience and my experience is that people do actuallly give shit to others for the way they play, specially considering most people don't pay much attention to what they say to others online.

The intention that the "soft mockery" comes out with isn't important at all, what matters is the impact it has on new people, that's the angle this take is going towards. If you're feeling attacked by this, i'm sorry about it, that's not the intention at all.

[Stupid Bunny]

This is indeed unresolvable because

• Everyone, author or player, has a different idea of what is difficult. This is not only a difference of degrees but also what people find difficult (proficiency with different weapons, fighting different monsters, platforming etc.) 
• Different authors approach balancing differently. I used to just remove monsters on below-UV difficulties but my latest megawad has basically the same monster count on HMP and UV but with rebalanced resources. Someone very clever once had the idea of putting more monsters on HNTR and fewer on UV to offer a narrower gap between ITYTD and N! and make both more palatable.
• UV doesn’t always mean the same thing to everyone. For some sets it’s “default if you’re experienced at Doom”, for others it’s “grind mode for experts and/or masochists only” and they assume most people downloading will be experienced Doomers anyway. This is before accounting for difficulty perception as above—I like the idea of balancing like this myself but I’m not good enough at Doom to pull it off.

For these reasons I can no longer be mad at anyone who says UV is too hard, though nowadays I play everything HMP on first playthrough. 

[knifeworld]

46 minutes ago, fishy said:

That's what your experience was and that's okay, I'm giving my experience and my experience is that people do actuallly give shit to others for the way they play, specially considering most people don't pay much attention to what they say to others online.

The intention that the "soft mockery" comes out with isn't important at all, what matters is the impact it has on new people, that's the angle this take is going towards. If you're feeling attacked by this, i'm sorry about it, that's not the intention at all.

Not feeling attacked, don't worry about that. But I do feel that players who enjoy playing mainly UV are being (however indirectly) shat on in this thread and in some sense are being blamed for this phenomenon of UV gatekeeping that personally feels 99% not-a-thing to me.

If someone feels truly impacted by how an in-group is soft mocking eachother, then idk what to say about that.

Like, this whole thing would only be an issue in any sense of the word if players were literally going about and telling others not to play lower difficulties because UV is the "one true" difficulty. This simply doesn't happen beyond cases like you mentioned seeing I guess, unless Doomtubers saying silly stuff or mappers saying UV is the intended difficulty gets considered as equating to the above, imo.

[Doomy__Doom]

1 hour ago, Bauul said:

Honestly aside from stating otherwise explicitly in the Readme or map information, there's never going to be a good way to mitigate for this in the standard way Doom plays.

At the risk of sounding obvious - difficulty names. Plain common videogame Easy/Normal/Hard instead of HNTR/HMP/UV won't fix established uv-or-bust-ers' habits, nor can it address "placement-driven balancing as a source of FOMO" or "hard is different for everyone" matters, but as far as stating author intent goes, that seems like the most reliable place. It will reach the eyes of all except -warp and button mash to start the game asap users.

[bioshockfan90]

Hey - not sure if this has been brought up, but DSDA-doom and (maybe some other ports, I haven't checked) have a rewind key you can hit if you get in a bad situation and take too many hits or fall in a death pit. That's primarily what I do instead of saving now, unless it's a really big map or I'm playing a ZDoom map.

 

It's tough though, I've been playing a lot of Bloons TD6 lately and I kinda feel like playing that a lot has got me thinking about how I approach Doom. In that game, there are lots of difficulties and sub-challenges and community challenges on how to beat the maps. Maybe you can just construct your own way of playing and if you like the map enough you can crank up your own internal difficulty?

 

"Okay, I beat the map on HNTR with 1 save, now let's see if I can do it without saving. Okay, maybe pistol-start. HMP?" Aaaand then UV. As others have stated all sets have different balancing, and it's not gonna be a 1-size fits all thing, but if you set your own scale - which need I remind you, Doom is a game that has multiple tools in place to let you customize your experience to your exact liking - maybe you'll have more fun. I even submitted a Chex Quest speedrun because it was something that was fun! Right now I'm trying to beat all the "classic" megaWADs - currently on Alien Vendetta, I've done both Scythes and Hell Revealed.

 

Not to beat a dead horse but yeah, play the game however you want as long as you're not being a sore loser over it. Even then, I guuuueeeess people are entitled to their whining if they want? They brought it upon themselves, you can't exactly change someone's worldview over how they play a videogame. I treat Doom way differently than say, Clone Hero, where I'm trying to 100% FC every song on Expert (I guess the "UV only" equivalent") and then on mostly every other video game I play on the easiest difficulty so for all you know these 'UV elitists' play their other favorite games another way.

 

This didn't really contribute anything, I just wanted to talk my shit.

[Shepardus]

2 hours ago, Bauul said:

If a source port or mod can add a way to implement more dynamic difficulties, such as decreasing the damage taken by the player or decreasing the health of the monsters during the level, I can absolutely see people using that to mitigate the difficulty of UV more than restarting the whole level/mapset at HMP or lower.

The Ultimate Custom Doom mod could do wonders here, allowing the player to set options like damage dealt/taken multipliers, starting/maximum health, health regeneration, and more. I just tried adjusting the monster health multiplier in the middle of a map, after damaging some monsters, and much to my surprise even that worked, I totally wasn't expecting that to work (monsters retain the same percentage when their health is adjusted). Would be nice if more people knew about this mod. Perhaps an enterprising mapper could even use the code to dynamically adjust the difficulty like the rank systems @Jayextee mentioned.

[NormalHuman]

I definitely fall into the uv only sphere (likely out of pride,) but I'm curious as someone aspiring to design maps, what do people expect when they play easier difficulties like hmp and itytd? A lot of what I enjoy about doom levels is ammo scarcity and well placed monsters that fit the scene. Especially if I place certain enemies in certain places because they work really well as that enemy, which I feel like is a problem with doom difficulty. A mancubus is a fundamentally different enemy from a revenant and simply replacing one with another completely changes how a room works. Simply removing enemies from a room, to me, makes rooms feel much more empty and makes me feel like I'm missing out, but maybe that's what hmp/itytd players like. I'm genuinely curious for those who play hmp/itytd what you guys like so I can develop maps for those difficulties better.

 

On 7/10/2024 at 12:51 PM, Perfect Bear said:

With that in mind, in a ZDoom gameplay mod I've been working on, the difficulties are handled differently; they all use UV spawns, but instead re-scale the damage done to you by baddies. UV uses baseline damage calculations, but you're able to withstand more punishment as the skill level goes down. This way, a casual still gets to take on the zombies and demons in their great hordes, which some feel Doom to be all about.

This solution works best for me from a level design perspective and I think that's why most modern games do it this way.

[DiavoJinx]

Just want to say: I've enjoyed this discussion!

 

Realized the past couple of nights I've been [subconsciously] putting more effort into differentiating the 3 primary skill levels than I had before I (and already was).  I think this is going to turn out well, such that UV will be "more difficult, and a bit different" (difficult does not equate to more monsters at all) so while I intend for these maps to be played on HMP as always, UV will be a worthwhile experience to replay them. (And those who play UV only will miss out on the intend experience and should play on HMP also.)

Edited July 12 by DiavoJinx

[knifeworld]

I recognize not everyone sees them this way, but I've always seen the difficulties HNTR, HMP, UV as being Easy, Normal, Hard. UDB might have something to do with that interpretation since that's how they're labeled there. ITYTD just feels like an even easier Easy/HNTR, and Nightmare is just a meme outside of wads made for it.

[NoName667]

If they want to endlessly slam their face into a brick wall repeatedly, I say let them.

 

[UserPlayer89]

5 hours ago, knifeworld said:

I recognize not everyone sees them this way, but I've always seen the difficulties HNTR, HMP, UV as being Easy, Normal, Hard. UDB might have something to do with that interpretation since that's how they're labeled there. ITYTD just feels like an even easier Easy/HNTR, and Nightmare is just a meme outside of wads made for it.

the nature of how Nightmare works with both respawning and fast monsters makes it automatically incompatible for basically any map with a large enough monster count unless players want to spend hours theorycrafting routes and praying to RNGesus

[prfunky]

7 hours ago, knifeworld said:

I recognize not everyone sees them this way, but I've always seen the difficulties HNTR, HMP, UV as being Easy, Normal, Hard. UDB might have something to do with that interpretation since that's how they're labeled there. ITYTD just feels like an even easier Easy/HNTR, and Nightmare is just a meme outside of wads made for it.

 

If I recall correctly, ITYTD takes the same monster spawns, health spawns and whatever other "things" as HNTR.

The difference between the two is in how the monsters act. Been so long since I played ITYTD I don't really

remember; I think imps cast no fireballs or something like that. Anyone want to pile on to this portion of the

discussion, you're welcome to school us all on the difference between ITYTD and HNTR.