Edgar_Figaro wrote:
Hopefully could find some way to prevent abuse.
It's impossible.
You have a limited number of skilled players that function as a gold mine for harder challenges. You can't prevent players from asking other players to complete the challenge. You can get rid of those, or set a cap difficulty to which balances out the number of players able to complete it, but then it defeats the purpose of this game. You can have a predetermined group, but then either the skilled players still remain in that group or everybody has an equal chance, which is same as capping the difficulty. But if that is to go on, it defeats the purpose because then the game is reduced to the fact that posting will hold you back and whoever can complete most challenges gets the upper hand. Posting will hold you back because a good amount of players will be able to complete the challenge, giving you less points then if you were to complete the challenge.
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There is a better form of the game with different rules that will work, however. A game where a group of N players propose a challenge and the player who's challenge is closest to the average of the number of players that completed each challenge gets the points. As an example:
Challenger A proposes a challenge which 7 players completed
Challenger B proposes a challenge which 2 players completed
Challenger C proposes a challenge which 4 players completed
Then Challenger C, which had 4 players complete the challenge, gets the points because (7 + 2 + 4)/3 = 4.33 is closest
This would allow even the challengers to participate in the challenges, and that can be a strategic participation too. Challenge picking will be akin to a complex form of rock, paper, scissors done sequentially.
Effect due to mechanics:
First one to throw the challenge will be on either extreme, second would be on opposite extreme, third would be closer to middle to that other end of that extreme, and so on. As a result, the strategy would be to make the difficulty closer to the average difficulty of all the players around to do the challenge. If all challenges are about the same difficulty, then it becomes a matter of what map the participants would like to do, and it becomes a popularity contest on who can propose a map most people would like to do. Just not too much, because remember, it's not who can get most, but who can get average. Asking friends to do your challenge will be spread out evenly across all challenges, so that cancels out.