[TopAce]

I plan to make a "Masochist Edition" of one of my campaigns that I already released (one of the three, I don't know which yet). Masochist Edition means that the missions' difficulty level would be dramatically increased, so that they would be more "challenging" (as some of you might call it). I chose the term masochist because as far as I know this community, there are many who like hard campaigns. This thing will be twice as hard; according to my plans, no mission in this Masochist Edition is supposed to be accomplished in two or three attempts, sometimes more. It depends on the length of the mission. Shorter (3-4 min) missions will be more difficult than longer ones, because I don't really like the idea of losing a mission in its 10th-12th minute. I suppose most of you agree with me on this.

My question is: Would you mind playing a campaign the missions of which are so difficult that you can only complete after numerous attempts?

[Warp Shadow]

Dude, after that Babylon 5 bullcrap, I don't care how many times I fail as long as the mission doesn't screw me over with

(a): Incredibly vague, unclear or contradictory directives
(b): Enemies that move faster across my screen than I can physically turn with sensitivity on max and that have undodgeable beams
(c): Terrifying flaws in mission design like being unable to jump until you go to a redevouz point which was not discussed earlier in the briefing, does not show up on sensors until you blunder near it, is 10 kilometers out, has no hotkey, escort position or navpoint to find it with and you have to get there in a balsa wood plane with 13 enemies chasing you and when you arrive, you have to wait 30 seconds until it activates, or even better, the commander yelling JUMP and nothing happens for about a minute and so you figure, "OH, I'm  supposed to jump" and you do and fail the mission for jumping too early! Then you try again, wait about 5 minutes after the message and THEN everyone jumps and you are okay to jump, and you're left saying "How the HELL did 2 extra zeros in the event timer get past bug testing!?"
(d): AI. Having to disable two ships at once, sending all 8 AI allies to disarm one and you disable the other and after 3 minutes, they still haven't taken down a single one of it's four guns and you fail or attacking an enormous fortress with tons of blobs and being shredded down to 21% by getting near, realizing that none of the AI followed you, sitting back and telling them all to attack and watching them mill about and bump into eachother like ganja doped critically retarded penguins.
(e): Unreasonable timeframes in which to take down a surprise carrier by yourself because all your allies got killed by their brainwashed companions, with your interceptor specced fighter that was perfect for taking down the lone refugee and her fighter escort until you got *****slapped by an enormous death machine and being berated for a minor failure if you can't destroy the entire ass nibbling thing in 2 minutes.

Seriously, I'm the guy who found all of the missions (including the virtual ones) too easy in BtRL, cranked the difficulty to 4/5 and still chewed through fighters like toilet paper.

I LOVE when things are difficult, but I HATE when things are artificially difficult. The viper is an amazing machine that takes any pilot hours upon hours to figure out everything it can do and has an enormous skill cap meaning that if you're good enough, you can take anything. The star fury (although it may be true to the show for all I know) seems like a handicap, making fighting more difficult rather than making the fights more difficult and the missions stop being "can you take down 14 fighters by yourself?" and start being "Take down three fighters, OOPS forgot to mention the flight of bombers converging on that capital ship you were supposed to defend but I didn't tell you, better luck next time". I mean sure the next time you know what will happen and can plan accordingly but the fact that the game had to resort to an underhanded cockslap like that galls me.

[Getter Robo G]

Congratulations, it seems you've already beta tested the  "Masochist Edition"

Did you enjoy it? 

[TopAce]

Response to Warp Shadow's post:

A, b, and c are already solved, because I'm modifying one of my already released campaigns. You will not get contradictory directives and I won't modify the tables. At most enemy ships will get Prom Ses or Kaysers instead of Subachs. And of course there will be more of them than normal, but I'll try to do my best not to kill all your wingmen in the first few seconds.
D: You won't have to be at two places at once. The missions will be completable without giving any orders to your wingmen. It will be like before: giving orders may make your job far easier or harder. I will not exploit the stupidity of your wingmen by design. Of course, I cannot test every possibility, so if you issue the "wrong command," you may be left on your own real quick.
E: Timeframe will not be an issue, and many fighter and bomber classes will be available to you in non-scramble missions, so you are at liberty to customize yourself (and your wing). Scramble and red-alert missions will be reasonable. If you are scrambled in a Perseus, you won't have to take down a Leviathan all by yourself while being attacked by four fighters. Red-alert missions might be problematic, so their difficulty won't be altered so much.

There won't be such a thing as your bomber example by design. You'll be told of every wing that might pose a threat to the completion of your missions.

[Colonol Dekker]

Leave it be, just edit the AI instead

[TopAce]

Like, changing your wingmen Generals to Lieutenants and hostiles from Lieutenants to Generals?

[Colonol Dekker]

I just meant the .TBL, so that it's less work for everyone save editing all missions / campaign files

[nubbles526]

I would like something like that, but in a Campaign form.

I remember the good old days they provided Gauntlet missions in FS1

[brandx0]

Personally, I'm of the opinion that a mission can be hard without needing to retry it a number of times.  My rationale for this?  Well, a hard mission and a multiple-try mission are very different

A hard mission requires a good amount of skill to complete.  You must aim straight, dodge well, and have a good sense of situational awareness.

A multiple-try mission is one where you fly the mission, find out all the things that'll happen, knowing you'll lose on the first try, and are simply an observer trying to get as much info as possible before you die.  Then you try again, knowing ahead of time what events will occur and when, as well as learning the best strategies for completion not through skill but through repetition.

I like hard missions, I hate multiple-try missions.  Any mission should be beatable on the first try.  If it isn't, then the mission is assuming obviously that you'll need some kind of precognition to beat it.

It's like the biggest flaw most people complain about in JRPGs, where there are a number of side quests, but the only way to beat them, or in many cases, even find out about them, is to buy the strategy guide, because without it, you're left in the dark, because there's no way you could find out about these things on your own.  This is similar to a multiple-try mission, where without foreknowledge of what's going to happen or what you're supposed to do, there's no way you'll be able to complete it.

So once again, every mission should be able to be completed on the first try, not because it's easy, but because you shouldn't need to know about things ahead of time.