[Community Puzzles] Difficulty rating

Feedback & Bugs
#1

I love the community puzzles, but I wish we could see a difficulty rating for the puzzle before starting. I know there’s no real penalty for abandoning a puzzle you start, but I like having a rough idea of how much time I will need to spend to solve something before I invest the time to read all about it. When I’m looking for a quick challenge to get my blood flowing in the morning I don’t want to waste time reading the Hard puzzles that will likely take me days to solve.

The original Single Player Puzzles are grouped by difficulty into Tutorial/Easy/Medium/Hard. It would be nice if we could have ratings for the community puzzles too.

Here are a few ways this could work:

  • People who solve a puzzle could optionally assign a difficulty rating.
  • The min, max, and average lines of code (or characters?) for accepted solutions could be displayed. This could be very misleading, but would be a fun statistic to view regardless. Given enough samples I think it would be a decent indicator of how complex some solutions became.
  • Display the number of unique users who viewed the puzzle divided by the number of unique users who solved the puzzle. Right now we can see the number of solutions only, but we don’t know if the puzzle is brand new, or was ever a featured weekly puzzle, so it has no context.
  • Admins assign a rating
4 Likes
#2

On Codewars, puzzles are tagged as beta before being fully released. Coders who solved the puzzle during the beta phase can vote for a diffculty rating, the average of which is then used as the final difficulty rating when the puzzle makes it to release.
I think it’d be great to have something similar here.

2 Likes
#3

This is a great idea. I like having people who solve the puzzle assign a rating.

#4

I suggest that difficulty be set or suggested by codingamers who approve. I also wish that different difficulty puzzles offer different xp. There are limited practice puzzles currently, and it would be nice to have a way to get xp by solving tough community puzzles (I personally refer to bulls and cows by @playerOne). This will also instigate users to try out the tougher ones, and not just solve the easy ones, and let the others remain as it is. It probably also feels good to be rewarded for solving a tough puzzle, and also be aware of what sort of challenge you are taking before starting a puzzle.