Topic: What Super Mario Maker tells us about Gamers skill level in general.

I'm a 30 something year old gamer who's been playing since the Atari. I never completed the original Mario, but did SMB2(US) Mario World and NSMBU. I played through DKTF and beat the last boss, but couldn't come close to 100%ing the game, similarly to Yoshi's Woolly World. I gave up with the difficulty of Shovel Knight. I've beaten most Zeldas, Won golds in 150cc MK8- but fail miserably at 200cc. The Arkham games were long battles but I mamged to collect all the Riddler trophies. I can beat SF4 on Easy but no greater, but I did get all platinum on Normal in Bayonetta 2 which I see as my most difficult achievement in games.

I am what I would call an average gamer.

Having played Mario Maker for a week now, I've come to understand that there are 4 types- or more precisely skills- of levels being made. About 5% are auto run levels (which at first are exciting, but after the 5th one or so become quite annoying). A good 65% of them are very basic, flat levels with some stacked enemies or a few bosses with an invincibility star in front. 10% are fair to excellently designed levels, with 3 to 5 tricky bits to give you a feeling of accomplishment. The final 20% are those hideously cruel speed runner pixel perfect jump levels. The levels I've made have been attempts at the 3rd kind, a challenge but a achievable challenge. I'm no games whizz but to upload them I needed to complete them so they aren't impossible. However the completion rate of them is somewhere between 3%-15%. It astonishes me looking at similar levels made by other people are similar in success rates-levels that are well designed and not broken by poor design (which I hope applies to mine as well), but have little over 20% completions. Obviously there are quite a few kids playing these games, but then when I was a kid I could have easily skimmed through the mid tier bracket, as could my friends.

We've all read people claiming to have 100% games 5 hours after release, and we take them with a pinch of salt- I'm sure there is a large percentage of difficulty that goes unchallenged in a lot of games. Obviously most Sandbox games aren't so much challenges any more as they have lots of save points and infinite lives, and they're more time consuming story than gameplay, awards being given for reaching a part of the story or pressing a button to make an animation happen. But it does make me wonder what the actual completion rate for most Nintendo games is? And for games in general?

I would say I complete most games I own, but not 100%- Overall about 60-70%. In percentage how much of a games content do you complete on average?

You're assuming a direct correlation between game completion and skill level. Most games I don't complete remain unfinished because I didn't like them or got bored of them. There are very few games that I stopped playing due to the difficulty being too high to progress.

The clear rate for Super Mario Maker isn't a measure of how many people could beat the level. Because it's a measure of how many times it was cleared for each attempt. Someone might die a few times before they beat a level. Hell, even if you ignore that metric and take the number of people who played it and how many who cleared it it's still not what you're talking about. Because sometimes people skip a level they could've beaten purely because they didn't like it

With a typical game that has a bunch of levels? You need to beat the level you're on to keep playing. Super Mario Maker isn't like that. If I'm going through the 100 Mario Challenge and come across something that's tricky AND not particularly fun? I'll skip it after a couple of attempts. There are literally more than a million levels out there so why would I stick with it? And it's the same thing with games in general. Why should I sit through 10+ hours of a game if I'm not enjoying it?

Most games require more forethought and less analogue button presses than platformers.

I find myself skipping more and more quickly while doing the 100Mario-Challenge, because I absolutely hate those Pixel-Perfect Levels, and even more so, I hate trolling ones with jumps of faith leading to unknowable perils or dead ends that really end in my death, but give no clue as to what might await behind them. those aren't fun, they are just bad. Same goes for most of the levels where you need a specific item to beat them, and if you don't, then you're screwed.

A good level should be fun and challenging, but also fair, and beatable with skill, not luck in keeping a specific item through countless unfair perils. It's difficult to achieve, because most of us never designed a platformer and are still experimenting, but some levels are really just bad and unfair, and only beatable, if you find the will to spend some lifes on trying to figure out what the level-creator already knows before playing and uploading it.

Please discuss this on the Mario maker thread.
https://www.nintendolife.com/forums/wii-u/mario_maker_rumor?st...