a complete difficulty rework in parkour

[TheSurvivor_5000]

the current difficulty and mana system is flawed in pretty much everyway you can think of. I will list a few ways that the mana system is flawed.

1. a lot of old maps do not match their difficulty
2. the current mana gain system rewards farmers more than actual skilled players (more mana for e-pearl spammers than players who beat those same maps legit)
3. (This one is not really about difficulty but i just thought i'd throw this in too) if you first beat a map on challenge mode, it does not mark as complete unless you then do it in normal mode
4. insane maps (5 - 60 minutes on completion, hard parkour) give 200 mana, while the courses at spawn like hogwarts, (5 - 20 minutes on completion, easy to medium parkour) give 1000 mana. The entire mana system needs a rebalance because like i said, it rewards farmers more than actual skilled players.
5. donor ranks give extra mana???? i understand that you can get donor ranks with cubits, but seriously?
6. all maps in a given difficulty give the same mana. This makes sense when you first look at it but think about this. The insane maps "Panda" and "TheSimpsons" are both insane maps that give 200 mana. Even though thesimpsons is far harder than panda, you earn the same amount of mana from it. (also relates to number 2)

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Possible solutions:

1 - just re-sort them idk, this is probably the smallest problem on the list its not a big deal
2 - a solution could be to buff the mana reward for challenge mode. Maybe for expert and insane difficulties, beating them in challenge mode gives 3x the mana than beating it in normal mode. This would incentivize players to stop e-pearl farming and to challenge themselves.
3 - idk just fix this
4 - This one is kind of a weird one. the way i would go about this is, maybe on the first completion it gives 750 - 1000 mana, but every completion after that only earns you 200 mana (sort of like the dropper mana system). Still sort of unbalanced but wayyy better than the current system.
5 - why does this even exist.. just no
6 - This one would be difficult to fix because there are a lot of maps, but maybe this change could only apply to insane maps: vary the mana rewards based on the map difficulty. From my example here's how i think it should be, Panda should be worth 175 mana in normal mode and 250 in challenge mode, and TheSimpsons should be worth 300 mana in normal and 1000 mana in challenge mode.

So yeah, that's pretty much all. I understand it is difficult to make a good difficulty system to balance everything out but the current one is just terrible. if you read this far you deserve a cookie because you read through all of my rambling. :cookie:

 

[Tas]

Let's talk about the first one, maps not fitting the difficulty.

The issue with "resorting" these maps is that there isn't anywhere for many maps to go. For example, easy maps. Like all difficulties, the average easy map is a lot harder now than it used to be. There are a lot of reasons for this which is another topic altogether but the question we need to ask is: what is the precedent?

If the precedent for a good easy map is LuckyBlock - the first easy map - then 90% of the 300-some easy maps on the server right now are way too hard, clearly. Additionally, if the precedent for an "easy medium" map is, say, Aztec - one of the first mediums - then half the easy maps are pushing too hard for mediums, let alone easy!

However if the precedent is a more modern map, which is inherently harder (when was a map as easy as any of the first 30 easy maps accepted?) then the earliest maps are almost too easy for Easy - which shouldn't exist. and by the way, there are players who struggle on Tower and AnimalCrossing....

it's not even close to as easy as it seems to reorder maps based on their actual difficulty. unless you want 15 difficulties instead of 5. there are easy maps that should be medium but are too short, experts that could be insane, insanes that are easier than many experts...

frankly it's a mess, and i don't know how to fix it- but i think the solution is somewhere along the lines of (1) nuking a lot of old old maps and (2) radically changing the criteria for accpted maps

 

[TheSurvivor_5000]

yeah i guess that does make sense. reordering old maps would be difficult because a lot of them don't fit the modern difficulty criteria and theres only 5 difficulties. i do think that if possible the mana reward should not be the same for all maps of a difficulty because there is quite a difficulty range for each. 1200+ maps on the server this is just unfeasable to adjust it for all of them