Hmmm... I've often wondered how much of a person's difficulty ranking is individual, and based on particular playing habits and strengths/weaknesses. I've always found the post-IN games to be significantly more difficult, overall, than the earlier ones, even though MoF often seems to be considered one of the easiest lunatics by many people. My 1cc of that was pretty much a fluke, as it was, I think.
The MoF / SA / UFO bullet and control systems are all consistent, whereas all the other games follow their own unique controls; though to be on the "general" side of things, I group PCB and IN together as well.
Also, I think some of the survey questions were too loaded to really give good data. I mean, who really wants to say, essentially that "I assume my death is rarely my own fault"
Quite. However,
that question basically boils down to "I blame the game for killing me more, or I blame myself for killing myself in the process of dodging (or doing whatever)". If this isn't the case, I could always ask the question again; I'm technically free at this point to write up another survey.
Some of the questions were intentionally made obscure, just to see where everybody
subjectively put themselves as players. In terms of being objective, I myself would have no idea where everybody would be placed, but it's a good way of finding out the proportion of players who think they put in adequate effort, and those who don't for instance.
I find it interesting (though perhaps unsurprising) that the number of lunatic players is not only so much higher than the other difficulties, but so much higher than the relative percentages of people who have 1cc'd hard or higher in that giant survey, a while back. Presumably, this is just because the people who read this sub-forum are better players, on average, than the general Touhou community.
This can be explained by the fact that I only appealed to HME, where the players are the ones who actively play the games to improve. I ended up doing this because I'm using a free account, thus the number of responses that I could receive were limited. If you know of any service that gives me the chance to collect unlimited responses
and is free with "no strings attached", by all means suggest it.
Also, oddly, despite how much complaining UFO gets, it received a higher rating than any other game except PCB. I wonder if some people thought they were rating the game's difficulty, and not how good they thought it was? Wait, we WERE rating how good we thought they were, weren't we?
If we were talking about difficulties, I'm
pretty sure that I wouldn't be seeing SoEW down there. StB got bad numbers as well, so this basically cements that everybody who took the survey knew that the question was asking how good do they think the game was.
That said, if I'm going to continue surveying, I'm better off splitting it off to another thread.
.
Also, you're more than welcome to add questions of your own; it's generally better and easier to organize and do other things if one person keeps hosting the surveys.