Newsgroups: rec.games.int-fiction
From: richard@skaro.demon.co.uk (Richard Develyn)
Path: gmd.de!nntp.gmd.de!Germany.EU.net!EU.net!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!demon!skaro.demon.co.uk!richard
Subject: IF Difficulty Survey - Results
Organization: skaro
Date: Fri, 22 Apr 1994 09:12:24 +0000
Message-ID: <1994Apr22.101224.1@skaro.demon.co.uk>
Sender: usenet@demon.co.uk
Lines: 59

Thank you very much to all who replied to my survey. A total of 12 
people plus myself cast 157 votes over 42 different games.

I would like this to be a continuing endeavour so please keep the 
entries coming in. If there's no objection on this conference (or its 
sister one) then I will make further appeals for votes in the months to 
come. Each time the number of entries exceed a certain threshold I will 
re-publish the results.

I think that in order to make any sort of reasonable evaluation on a 
game we should have a minumum of 5 votes entered for it. A total of 14 
games (1/3 of them) satisfy this criteria at present.

If you recall there were 5 categories for voting: Easy, Medium, Hard, V. 
Hard and Gave Up. The last section is slightly special and I'll deal 
with it later, otherwise I have deduced a difficulty level based on the 
spread of votes. The results, in order of popularity, are:

Votes   Difficulty  Title
-----   ----------  -----
 12     Medium+     Zork1
  9     Hard        Zork2
  9     Medium      Zork3
  9     Hard+       Deadline
  9     Hard        Starcross
  9     Hard        HHGTTG
  7     Easy-Med    Wishbringer
  6     Easy-Med    Planetfall
  6     Easy+       Stationfall
  6     Medium      Sorceror
  5     Medium      Lurking Horror
  5     Medium      Enchanter
  5     Easy+       Witness
  5     Easy+       Infidel

(Difficulty levels go: Easy..Easy+..Easy-Med..Medium-..Medium etc)

Deadline certainly came out as the hardest (nobody gave it a Easy or 
Medium vote) and also features in this short gave up list:

Votes   Title
-----   -----
  4     Starcross
  3     Deadline
  2     Bureaucracy

(the qualifying criteria here being at least 2 votes).

I hope this is interesting to you all. Please send more survey entries 
in.

Richard

--

Richard Develyn from Hastings, Sussex, England ( rad@cix.compulink.co.uk ).
Software engineer (datacomms) for Cray Network Systems. Married to Caroline.
Baby daughter Sophie (b. 3/11/92). Hobbies: Dr Who, FRPG, SF, Curry,
quality computer games, philanthropic discussions.
