At present difficulty is set arbitrary by a few person who approve contribution. Many other users could disagree with this difficulty. Let’s switch it to the election by The Wisdom of Crowds. Anyone who complete puzzle can vote for it’s difficulty and the average difficulty will be set. Its reliable approach as in ‘The parable of the ox’. To bypass ranking points confusion, when difficulty degrades, let’s say points cannot be taken away.
I deal with enterprise systems so I’d see it from the enterprise point of view.
There are propaganda and promotion campaigns launched by CG, and sometimes from recommendations and spread-of-words in social media about CG, which could include links to many featured puzzles.
Google and other searching tools, forums and discussion boards are also archiving links and contents of current puzzles.
If puzzles are allowed to be moved easily between /easy and /medium areas, these known links will be broken. CG’s expansion and revenue generating plans will be hindered.
So, NO. Moving a puzzle should be done sparingly, unless the above problem is resolved.
Indeed, voting is not quite necessary. Users only need to read the number of success submissions and success rate of a puzzle to get a reasonably reliable judgement of the real difficulty of the puzzle.
This could be a good point, but in fact the ‘difficulty’ part of a puzzle’s URL is just sugar…
Try this one: https://www.codingame.com/training/expert/onboarding
2 Likes
I think the broken link problem can be easily dealt with some routing rules in the controller part of the website code (or even with http 301 redirects)
And it is already taken care of. Check out these links (or any other puzzle)
https://www.codingame.com/training/easy/hello-world
https://www.codingame.com/training/medium/hello-world
https://www.codingame.com/training/hard/hello-world
https://www.codingame.com/training/expert/hello-world
or even
https://www.codingame.com/training/don-t-try-this-at-home-it-is-the-hardest-puzzle-ever/hello-world
EDIT: did not want to repeat what Blaise wrote, just started to respond a bit earlier.
2 Likes
An interesting sugar I was not aware of.
When broken url is not an issue, CG could develop an AI to automatically re-classify the puzzle again based on existing statistics.
I know it has been done once a few years ago but either the stats or the AI was not good enough that resulted in some easy Hard puzzles.
1 Like
I think the existing system usually works well.
But you can find examples when the difficulty of the puzzle clearly does not correspond to the section.
I think you can give experienced users of the site the right to change the difficulty of the puzzle.
Every user with level 29+ can already do this today (except for the other puzzles, same of them can only be edited by staff)
If single user can change it, it’s even more arbitrary. @About meant that group of experienced user choose difficulty together (by voting), if I understood correctly, which if also good idea.
Continuous voting system would be maintenance-free. In contrast to ask a user with permission to change it manually