A few weeks ago, I woke up from a long hiatus to revisit Blockland. After being accustomed with the new features, I noticed that there were only RPG and DM servers and nothing else. Then, after some thinking, I decided to create something that has always been a crowd-pleaser: A Challenge! So, with much focusing, I finally built a great and difficult challenge course using only the traditional bricks and kill-events.
However, when I finally hosted the challenge, the reaction I received was not as expected. The first few people joined and ragequitted after failing to complete the first few jumps of the level. The next few complained about the lack of checkpoints in my level, in which I complied by tripling the amount of checkpoints. After more ragequits, I resorted to giving into the players' complaints about the difficulty of the level and adjusting the plates until they were super easy to complete. I also spawned a horse gun and shot horse rays at the complainers as punishment, but they had an easier time completing the challenge as horses, so I stopped doing that. There were a few people (mostly veterans) who actually managed to beat the third/fourth level before ragequitting and I find that their skill to be way above the average skill-level. I stopped hosting after 3 days or so.
I remembered that when hosting my old challenges during the pre-v8 days, people were actually competent and persistent in completing my challenges. But now, people are starting to become more impatient and demand more from the challenges, trying to replace something that takes skill into a gimmicky-event spewing contraption that would be even more impossible to complete due to occasional lag.
Therefore I ask you: What makes a good challenge now?
Should I finally import new brick packs to spice up my builds? Should I comply with the general untalented population and implement more unstable events? Or should I just go back to making slides (although I think I exhausted every possible idea using slides)?
