Difficulty Sweet Spot

[y2khappens]

In my humble opinion, Peter (pcad) hit the nail on the head. I have had the same thoughts for quite some time, just never expressed them on the forum. Of course you have to have at least a little interest in puzzles, as I have shown the blue extreme to many individuals, trying to get them interested. After a little playing, they say " Oh, that's nice, however too hard for me". This goes to show that a large segment of the population could care less about puzzles. So then you are down to the "puzzling community", in which I would say the vast number would like a little difficulty, however not something that requires 10, 20, 40 or over a hundred hours to solve. Other than the blue and maybe the green extremes, I would put the rest in the "die hard" puzzling community, where these are the individuals that have a "passion" for puzzles, then anything goes / nothing is too difficult. As others have said, who are the individuals that have the time and inclination to try to solve the silver gold, etc. I guess the majority of the active forum members are the ones, "the passionate" individuals who love to solve difficult puzzles. Again, in my humble opinion, these individuals, by and large, are intelligent, talented, articulate and sometimes obsessive, compulsive and bull-headed. LOL Bottom line, Chris does need to listen to feedback and decide whether this is an expensive "hobby" that he personally subsidizes for puzzle "addicts" :>) or whether this is going to be a viable/profitable business in which he hopes to appeal to larger numbers of people by developing a line of puzzles that are not extremely difficult. Personally, I believe that Chris started out on the right foot with something that appealed to more individuals and then was distracted by a vocal minority that wanted more and more difficult puzzles, taking him on a tangent away from the public as a whole and good business decisions. Understand please, I have great respect and envy for those individuals that can solve difficult puzzles so quickly while I struggle and struggle to no avail. Enough said.

[Quaxo76]

I'm new to Revomazing so everything is hard and exciting for me, thus I'm trying to follow a "difficulty progression", like most people here did. So, I don't know if, after solving the more difficult puzzles, I would buy an hypothetical super-easy one. But that's not the point.
Of course most silver-solvers wouldn't buy anything "trivial". BUT - thousands of new people might. And among these thousands, many could want to "escalate" difficulty.
So if it were me... yes, I'd produce some very simple mazes. Possibly plastic, to keep costs low and attract as many people as possible.
And I'd continue producing mazes on several different difficulty levels, in decreasing quantities as difficulty increases.
They might need to find a better way to name them - after all there are only so many named colors, and it could get confusing!

Cristian